Using multiple sequence alignment and statistical language model to integrate multiple Chinese address recognition outputs

Different recognizers may result in different mistakes when they are used to recognize a Chinese address. In this paper, we present a method of combining multiple Chinese address recognition outputs to improve Chinese address recognition accuracy. The method first employs multiple sequence alignment to generate a lattice of candidate hypotheses from multiple different recognizer outputs and then applies statistical language model to choose the maximum likelihood candidate sequence. Taking the maximum as the final decision, the performance of our method is superior, compared to the single recognizers and Miyao's method. The experiments on the address images of real envelopes demonstrate that the proposed method increases the character recognition accuracy rate from 95.80% to 98.38%, with 61.30% error reduction. Furthermore, the corrected sorting rate of an automatic mail sorting system increases from 84.11% to 93.72%.