"Accelerating Text Communication via Abbreviated Sentence Input" by Jiban Krishna Adhikary, Jamie Berger et al.
 

Accelerating Text Communication via Abbreviated Sentence Input

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2021

Department

Department of Computer Science

Abstract

Typing every character in a text message may require more time or effort than strictly necessary. Skipping spaces or other characters may be able to speed input and reduce a user’s physical input effort. This can be particularly important for people with motor impairments. In a large crowdsourced study, we found workers frequently abbreviated text by omitting mid-word vowels. We designed a recognizer optimized for expanding noisy abbreviated input where users often omit spaces and mid-word vowels. We show using neural language models for selecting conversational-style training text and for rescoring the recognizer’s n-best sentences improved accuracy. On noisy touchscreen data collected from hundreds of users, we found accurate abbreviated input was possible even if a third of characters was omitted. Finally, in a study where users had to dwell for a second on each key, sentence abbreviated input was competitive with a conventional keyboard with word predictions. After practice, users wrote abbreviated sentences at 9.6 words-per-minute versus word input at 9.9 words-per-minute.

Publication Title

Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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