The Use of Context in Pattern Recognition

    Motivation :

    In our everyday lives we end up using context in order to perceive and recognize patterns.

  • If one would have to obtain an independent solution without the luxury of looking at how the problem was posed, they would be in for a very difficult task.

  • If one were to interpret how speech were interpreted they would find it highly dependent on the context in which the the words being spoken.

  • Take for example the utterance "jeetyet." This would make very little sense unless it were spoken in a high school cafeteria where one friend was asking another if he or she had eaten yet.

  • The idea is to consider some entity Z (such as written characters or images).  Z has certain properties when it is viewed on its own versus when we look at it some other context.  The entity Z, can further have even different properties when seen in one context A, versus another context B. There are many examples of how this is relevant.

  • Consider the word celebration versus the word  CELEBRATION!!!!!!

    Cleary one example is much more festive than the other based solely on the context that is introduced. In fact it may even be the first thing that you noticed on the computer screen. However, one must realize that the context does not lie only in the data but also lies with the "perceiver" in the form of expectations and can depend heavily on culture.