Classifying a string formed from hand-written characters

A method of classifying a character string formed from a known number of hand-written characters, said method comprising the steps of:

• identifying by a processor character templates having the known number of characters, each character template having a respective predetermined probability of occurrence in a text corpus and representing a respective combination of character types;
• determining by a processor character probabilities for each hand-written character in the character string, each character probability representing a likelihood of the respective hand-written character being a respective one of a plurality of predetermined characters, each predetermined character having a respective character type;
• determining by the processor character sequence probabilities corresponding to each of the character templates having the known number of characters, the character sequence probabilities being a function of the predetermined probability of the respective character template and the character probabilities of the hand-written characters in the character string matching the character types of the character template;
• and
• classifying by the processor the character string as the sequence of characters having the highest character sequence probability.