1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing method of performing a process on input information such as a character or a figure. In particular, the invention relates to a technology for improving a recognition rate of an input character, figure, or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
A handwritten character or figure can be input to a device provided with a screen capable of accepting direct input by a pen or a stylus. Examples of such a device include a touch screen, an electronic whiteboard, a PDA with a touch panel, and a tablet PC. With this device, natural input can be achieved as if a handwritten character or figure is drawn on a sheet of paper or a whiteboard. If a technology related to a handwritten character recognition or figure recognition is integrated with the device, stroke information generated by the handwriting can be converted into digital data in the form of text or the like, whereby it is possible to use the data for various subsequent processes.
Meanwhile, as speech recognition technology has been developed and hardware performance has been improved, it is becoming possible to input speech not only to a PC or a work-station but also to various computer control devices.
In such circumstances, instead of employing the pen input alone or the speech input alone, there is proposed a technology for promoting operational efficiency through plural mode input by using the pen and the speech in combination. In this technical field, the term multimodal is sometimes used to denote input using two or more different modes. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 06-085983 suggests a system in which by drawing a figure through handwriting with a pen and pronouncing a type of the figure at the same time, the handwritten figure is shaped and displayed.
The handwriting input and the speech input both have the merit of achieving intuitive input, but have a demerit of “false recognition”. For example, a case will be considered in which a user draws a figure through handwriting and a figure recognition process is applied to the drawing for automatic shaping. Even when the user had an intention to draw “quadrangle”, the figure may be recognized as “circle” by false recognition and shaped into a circle to be displayed. In contrast to this, according to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 06-085983, when the user draws a figure and pronounces the figure type at the same time, the pronunciation is phonetically recognized to identify the figure type, so that the input figure is shaped in accordance with the identified figure type. However, the speech recognition also suffers from false recognition. Even when the user pronounces “quadrangle”, if the pronunciation is recognized as “triangle”, the figure is shaped into a triangle and displayed, so improper shaping unintended by the user is performed. That is, there is a problem in that the system aim cannot be achieved with false recognition.
In this case, the particular example of using the figure recognition and the speech recognition is taken for the description, but pattern recognitions such as character recognition, face recognition, and gesture recognition also have the same problems.