Exemplary techniques are described for selecting radical sets for use in probabilistic Eastern Asian character recognition algorithms. An exemplary technique includes applying a decomposition rule to each Eastern 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 Eastern Asian characters using maximum likelihood and minimum description length and solving the optimization problem for the optimal set of radicals. Another exemplary technique includes selecting an optimal set of radicals by using a general function that characterizes a radical with respect to other Eastern Asian characters and a complex function that characterizes complexity of a radical.