A Sketch-Based Educational System for Learning Chinese Handwriting

Abstract

Learning Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) is a difficult task for students in English-speaking countries due to the large symbol set and complicated writing techniques. Traditional classroom methods of teaching Chinese handwriting have major drawbacks due to human experts’ bias and the lack of assessment on writing techniques. In this work, we propose a sketch-based educational system to help CSL students learn Chinese handwriting faster and better in a novel way. Our system allows students to draw freehand symbols to answer questions, and uses sketch recognition and AI techniques to recognize, assess, and provide feedback in real time. Results have shown that the system reaches a recognition accuracy of 86% on novice learners’ inputs, higher than 95% detection rate for mistakes in writing techniques, and 80.3% F-measure on the classification between expert and novice handwriting inputs.