1. A method comprising: providing a set of East Asian characters; applying a decomposition rule to each East Asian character of the set to generate a progressive splitting graph where the progressive splitting graph comprises radicals as nodes; formulating an optimization problem to find an optimal set of radicals to represent the set of East Asian characters using maximum likelihood and minimum description length; solving the optimization problem for the optimal set of radicals; and using the optimal set of radicals in a Hidden Markov Model based character recognition algorithm.