Motivation
● quick talk that I had sitting around
● originally: 2001, but relevant today
– HMM/OCR work at Google
● not a polished talk
● no punchline

Overview
● problem: “input signal” → transcription
– signal: speech, line of printed or handwritten text
● properties
– input signal generated from sequence of symbols
● speech: phonemes
● handwriting/OCR: characters
– symbols correspond to “segments” of input
– segments are linearly arranged
– segments are noisy
– output represents a valid sentence in natural language
– often know even more about the output (domain of
discourse, etc.)