Loading [MathJax]/extensions/TeX/ietmacros.js
A probabilistic mobile text entry system for agglutinative languages | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

A probabilistic mobile text entry system for agglutinative languages

Publisher: IEEE

Abstract:

In this work, a probabilistic mobile text entry system based on statistical language models is proposed. Mobile devices having limited keyboards usually produce ambiguous...View more

Abstract:

In this work, a probabilistic mobile text entry system based on statistical language models is proposed. Mobile devices having limited keyboards usually produce ambiguous inputs due to multiple letter assignment to each key. Faster typing can be achieved by predicting the intended word which decreases the number of required keystrokes. Currently available methodologies mostly rely on dictionaries, which are impractical for agglutinative languages. The complex morphological structure of these languages gives rise to very high number of word forms that cannot be efficiently covered by any dictionary. The proposed system uses n-gram letter probabilities and K Best Viterbi decoding to generate a list of predictions. The dictionary based method and the proposed probabilistic system are evaluated against a typical agglutinative language, Turkish. The experimental results indicate that the proposed system outperforms the dictionary based method with a 33% improvement in performance.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics ( Volume: 56, Issue: 2, May 2010)
Page(s): 1018 - 1024
Date of Publication: 15 July 2010

ISSN Information:

Publisher: IEEE

I. Introduction

The use of mobile devices has increased dramatically for the past few decades. Although the fundamental function of mobile phones is to provide voice communication and SMS services, recent mobile phones offer a rich set of additional features like instant e-mailing, document editing, surfing on the internet and GPS support. However, mobile devices have two main drawbacks: limited screen sizes and limited keyboards. Entering text through keyboard is required to write an SMS or an e-mail, to fill a web form, to edit a document or even to enter an address in the map. Fig. 1 shows a standard headset keyboard which has only a 12-key keypad (also some devices may have additional function keys) to write all letters and this limited keypad is the main obstacle to a better human-computer interaction for mobile devices. Although many researchers work on alternative keyboard designs for mobile devices [1]–[2] and many devices on the market have mini or on-screen QWERTY keyboards, the majority of the market still has the traditional 12-key keypad and suffers from low text entry speed. Considering the growing market on mobile emailing, it is essential for the mobile phone developers to devise faster typing methods [3].

A typical mobile phone 12-key keypad design.

References

References is not available for this document.