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Effects of language modeling and its personalization on touchscreen typing performance

  • Andrew Fowler
  • , Kurt Partridge
  • , Ciprian Chelba
  • , Xiaojun Bi
  • , Tom Ouyang
  • , Shumin Zhai
  • Oregon Health and Science University
  • Alphabet Inc.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

79 Scopus citations

Abstract

Modern smartphones correct typing errors and learn userspecific words (such as proper names). Both techniques are useful, yet little has been published about their technical specifics and concrete benefits. One reason is that typing accuracy is difficult to measure empirically on a large scale. We describe a closed-loop, smart touch keyboard (STK) evaluation system that we have implemented to solve this problem. It includes a principled typing simulator for generating human-like noisy touch input, a simple-yet-effective decoder for reconstructing typed words from such spatial data, a large web-scale background language model (LM), and a method for incorporating LM personalization. Using the Enron email corpus as a personalization test set, we show for the first time at this scale that a combined spatial/language model reduces word error rate from a pre-model baseline of 38.4% down to 5.7%, and that LM personalization can improve this further to 4.6%.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCHI 2015 - Proceedings of the 33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Subtitle of host publicationCrossings
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages649-658
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450331456
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 18 2015
Event33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015 - Seoul, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Apr 18 2015Apr 23 2015

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
Volume2015-April

Conference

Conference33rd Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2015
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CitySeoul
Period04/18/1504/23/15

Keywords

  • Keyboard error correction
  • Language modeling
  • Mobile text entry

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