Language modeling for soft keyboards

ABSTRACT

Language models predict the probability of letter sequences. Soft keyboards are images of keyboards on a touch screen for input on Personal Digital Assistants. When a soft keyboard user hits a key near the boundary of a key position, the language model and key press model are combined to select the most probable key sequence. This leads to an overall error rate reduction by a factor of 1.67 to 1.87. An extended version of this paper [4] is available.

REFERENCES

• 1: Fitts, P.M. The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement, Journal of Experimental Psychology 47 (1954), pp. 381-391.
• 2: Mikael Goldstein , Robert Book , Gunilla Alsiö , Silvia Tessa, Non-keyboard QWERTY touch typing: a portable input interface for the mobile user, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.32-39, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.302984]
• 3: Goodman, J. Putting it all together: language model combination, in ICASSP-2000, Istanbul, June 2000.
• 4: Goodman, J., Venolia, G., Steury, K., Parker, C. Language Modeling for Soft Keyboards. Microsoft Research technical report MSR-TR-2001-118, available from http://www.research.microsoft.com/pubs.
• 5: I. Scott MacKenzie , Hedy Kober , Derek Smith , Terry Jones , Eugene Skepner, LetterWise: prefix-based disambiguation for mobile text input, Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, November 11-14, 2001, Orlando, Florida [doi>10.1145/502348.502365]
• 6: I. Scott MacKenzie , Shawn X. Zhang, The design and evaluation of a high-performance soft keyboard, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.25-31, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.302983]
• 7: Dario D. Salvucci, Inferring intent in eye-based interfaces: tracing eye movements with process models, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: the CHI is the limit, p.254-261, May 15-20, 1999, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States [doi>10.1145/302979.303055]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Input devices and strategies (e.g., mouse, touchscreen)

Additional Classification:
  G. Mathematics of Computing
  G.1 NUMERICAL ANALYSIS
      G.1.0 General
          Subjects: Error analysis
  G.4 MATHEMATICAL SOFTWARE
      Subjects: User interfaces

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
corrective keyboard, language model, soft keyboard