Accent Detection in Handwriting Based on Writing Styles

Accent in handwriting can be defined as the influence of a writer's native script on his/her writing style in another script. In this paper, we approach the problem of detecting the existence of accents in handwriting. We approach this problem using two sets of writers, those who can write only in English, and the other set being multilingual writers who can also write in English. We learn the writing styles that are predominant in each set and use it as features in classification. Latent Dirichlet Allocation is used to learn the distribution over writing styles. Experimental results suggest the existence of accents in handwriting.