Abstract: The present invention relates to an abstract generation method of generating an abstract from document information, such as an electronic patient chart, and a program product that implements the abstract generation method, and has an object to make it possible to display only main parts of sentences concisely and effectively. When document information (electronic patient chart, for instance) is inputted into a system, morphological analysis is performed on the document information and it is judged whether a part of a sentence matches the whole of another sentence. When a matching result is obtained, a partially matching character string is set as a simplified sentence candidate. On the other hand, when a matching result is not obtained, the sentence is set as a simplification candidate as it is.

Abstract: An apparatus for recognizing characters read by a reading unit. A circumscribing rectangle of a read character is formed, and the degree of narrowness of that circumscribing rectangle is acquired. Characters having a degree of narrowness that is equal to or greater than a predetermined value are selected and blank areas are added to the circumscribing rectangle to yield a character area with a corrected degree of narrowness. The character is normalized by converting the character area to a specified size, and is recognized based on the normalized character. It is therefore possible to normalize even characters significantly elongated vertically or horizontally for easier recognition and to group their character patterns.

Abstract: A hand-written character recognition apparatus includes a CIS, and image data of each character of addressing information hand-written on a transmission original, which is read by the CIS, is stored in a bit-mapped line buffer. A histogram of one direction, e.g. an X direction (main scanning direction) is produced on the basis of the image data, and the histogram is stored in the histogram buffer. A rough position of each of the characters is evaluated on the basis of the histogram, and a character width of each of the characters, preferably an average character width is evaluated with referring to the line buffer. Then, a blank portion having a size of 1.5 times or less the average character width is detected as a space between characters.