Some linguistic and statistical problems in pattern recognition

摘要

It has been pointed out that all pattern recognition activities depend on writing and reading descriptions of patterns and pattern classes in some special purpose language. This uniform point of view allows all these languages to be considered in terms of some predicate calculus. The feature extraction problem then turns out to be the problem of simplification of sentences by defining new predicates in the language. It has been suggested that the problem can be looked upon as one in the presentation of algebras.A hypothesis has been suggested which might explain the importance of simplicity of description in pattern recognition and in scientific theories.