AUTOMATIC INDEX CREATION FOR HANDWRITTEN DIGITAL INK NOTES

A system for automatically generating indexes for handwritten notes captured as digital ink in a computer is disclosed. Ink words are identified, and features of the ink words are computed. Pairwise distances or match scores, which measure the distance in the features between two ink words, are calculated. A clustering technique selects equivalence classes of ink words. Index terms, which are non-uniform through-out the notes, are selected from the equivalence classes of ink words. The system generates an index from the index terms, including displaying pages numbers where the index terms are located in the notes as well as hyper-linking the index terms. A technique to identify a threshold for use in clustering the ink words is also disclosed.