Towards an Intelligent Multilingual Keyboard System
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Towards an Intelligent Multilingual Keyboard System Tanapong Potipiti, Virach Sornlertlamvanich, Kanokwut Thanadkran National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, National Science and Technology Development Agency, Ministry of Science and Technology Environment, 22nd Floor Gypsum Metropolitan Tower 539/2 Sriayudhya Rd. Rajthevi Bangkok 10400 Thailand Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT 3 THE APPROACH This paper proposes a practical approach employing n-gram 3.1 Overview models and error-correction rules for Thai key prediction and In the traditional Thai keyboard input system, a key button with Thai-English language identification. The paper also proposes the help of language-switching key and the shift key can output rule-reduction algorithm applying mutual information to reduce 4 different characters. For example, in the Thai keyboard the ‘a’- the error-correction rules. Our algorithm reported more than key button can represent 4 different characters in different 99% accuracy in both language identification and key modes as shown in Table 1. prediction. Table 1: A key button can represent different characters in 1 INTRODUCTION different modes. For Thai users, there are always two annoyances while typing English Mode English Mode Thai Mode Thai Mode without Shift with Shift without Shift with Shift Thai-English bilingual documents, which are usual for Thais. ¢ § The first is when the users want to switch from typing Thai to ‘a’ ‘A’ ‘ ’‘’ English, they have to input a special key to tell the operating system to change the language mode. Further, if the language- However, using NLP technique, the Thai-English switching key is ignored, they have to delete the token just typed keyboard system which can predict the key users intend to type and re-type that token after language switching. The second is without the language-selection key and the shift key, should be that Thai has more than 100 alphabets, to input about half of all efficiently implemented. We propose an intelligent keyboard Thai characters, the user has to use combinations of two keys system to solve this problem and have implemented with (shift key + another key) to input them. Some of the other Asian successful result. users also have the same problem. To solve this problem, there are basically two steps: language identification and Thai key prediction. Figure 1 shows It will be wonderful, if there is a intelligent keyboard how the system works. system that is able to perform these two tasks –switching language and shifting key– automatically. This paper proposes a practical solution for these disturbances by applying trigram character probabilistic model and error-correction rules. To Key Input optimize number of the generated error-correction rules, we propose a rule reduction approach using mutual information. More than 99 percent of key prediction accuracy results are Language reported. Identification Thai 2 RELATED WORKS There is only one related work on inputting Chinese words through 0-9 numpad keys. [8] applied lexical trees and Chinese Thai Key word n-grams to word prediction for inputting Chinese Eng Prediction sentences by using digit keys. They reported 94.4% prediction accuracy. However, they did not deal with automatic language Yes identification process. The lexical trees they employed required a large amount of space. Their algorithm is required some improvement for a practical use. Output Figure 1: How the System Works 3.2 Language Identification The following example illustrates the disturbance of language switching. In the Thai input mode, typing a word “language” will result “¢gÁ¢Á”. It is certain that the user has to delete sequence “¢gÁ¢Á” and then switches to the English mode before retyping the key sequence to get the correct result of “language”. Therefore an intelligent system to perform language switching three keys input around each error character and the correct automatically is helpful in eliminating the annoyance. pattern corresponding with the error will be collected as an In general, different languages are not typed error-correction pattern. For example, if the input key sequence connectedly without spaces between them. The language- “glik[lkl9in” is predicted as “Á«¦¬µ¦r”, where the correct identification process starts when a non-space character is typed prediction is “Á«¦¬«µ¦r”. The string “ik[lkl9” is then collected as after a space. Many works in language identification, [3] and [5], an error sequence and “¬«µ” is collected as the correct pattern have claimed that the n-gram model gives a high accuracy on to amend the error. language identification. After trying both trigrams and bigrams, we found that bigrams were superior. We then compare the following bigram probability of each language. Training Corpus P − Tprob = S7 . L . L + L = Trigram Prediction Model P − Eprob = S ( . L . L + L = Errors from Trigram where Prediction S7 is the probability of the bi-gram key buttons considered in Thai texts. K is the key button considered. Error-Correction Rules S ( is the probability of the bi-gram key buttons considered in English texts. Tprob is the probability of the considered key-button Figure 2: Error-Correction Rule Extraction sequence to be Thai. Eprob is the probability of the considered key-button sequence to be English. 3.3.2.2 Rule Reduction m is the number of the leftmost characters of the token In the process of collecting the patterns, there are a lot of considered. (See more details in the experiment.) redundant patterns collected. For example, patterns no.1-3 in The language being inputted is identified by Table 2 should be reduced to pattern 4. To reduce the number of comparing the key sequence probability. The language will be rules, left mutual information and right mutual information ([7]) identified as Thai if Tprob > Eprob and vice versa. are employed. When all patterns are shortened, the duplicate patterns are then eliminated in the final. 3.3 Key Prediction without Using Shift Key Table 2: Error-Correction Rule Reduction for Thai Input Pattern Error Key Sequences Correct Patterns 3.3.1 Trigram Key Prediction No. ¬«µ The trigram model is selected to apply for the Thai key 1. k[lkl9 prediction. The problem of the Thai key prediction can be 2. mpklkl9 ¥µ«µ defined as: 3. kkklkl9 µ¬µ«µ Q 4. lkl9 «µ τ = DUJ PD[ Π S F L _ F L F L S . L _ F L L = F F F Q where Left mutual information (Lm) and right mutual τ is the sequence of characters that maximizes the information (Rm) are the statistics used to shorten the patterns. character string sequence probability, Lm and right Rm are defined as follows. c is the possible input character for the key button = p(xyz) K, Lm(xyz) , K is the key button, p(x) p( yz) n is the length of the token considered. p(xyz) Rm(xyz) = , 3.3.2 Error Correction for Thai Key Prediction p(xy) p(z) In some cases of Thai character sequence, the trigram model where fails to predict the correct key. To correct these errors, the error- xyz is the pattern being considered, correction rules proposed by [1] and [2] is employed. x is the leftmost character of xyz, y is the middle substring of xyz, 3.3.2.1 Error-correction Rule Extraction z is the rightmost character of xyz, p( ) is the probability function. After applying trigram prediction to the training corpus are considered to prepare the error correction rule. The left and right The pattern-shortening rules are as follows. Table 4: Information on Alphabets Used in Corpus 1) If the Rm(xyz) is less than 1.20 then pattern xyz is reduced Training Corpus Test Corpus to xy. (%) (%) 2) Similarly, If the Lm(xyz) is less than 1.20 then pattern xyz Unshift Alphabets 88.63 88.95 is reduced to yz. Shift Alphabets 11.37 11.05 3) Rules 1 and 2 are applied recursively until the considered pattern cannot be shortened anymore. After all patterns are shortened, the following rules are applied G NL to eliminate the redundant patterns. 0 1 2 3 1) All duplicate rules are unified. 2) The rules that contribute less 0.2 per cent of error corrections are eliminated. (i) The automaton for patterntGNLu 3.3.3 Applying Error-correction Rules L NG There are three steps in applying the error-correction rules: 0 1 2 3 1) Search the error patterns in the text being typed. 2) Replace the error patterns with the correct patterns. 3) If there are more than one pattern matched, the longest (ii) The automaton for patterntLNGu pattern will be selected. In order to optimize the speed of error-correction processing and correct the error in the real time, the finite-automata pattern N G matching ([4] and [6]) is applied to search error sequences. We 1 2 3 constructed an automaton for each pattern, then merge these L automata into one as illustrated in Figure 3. N N 0 4. EXPERIMENTS G 4.1 Language Identification NL 4 To create an artificial corpus to test the automatic 5 6 language switching, 10,000 random words from an English dictionary and 10,000 random words from a Thai dictionary are (iii) Merging automata (I) and (ii) selected to build a corpus for language identification experiment. All characters in the test corpus are converted to their mapping characters of the same key button in normal mode (no shift key Figure 3: The Example of Constructing and applied) without applying the language-switching key. For Merging Automata example, character ‘¢’, ‘§’ and ‘a’ will be converted to ‘a’. For the language identification, we employ the key-button bi-grams extracted As a conclusion the first 6 characters of the token are enough to yield a high accuracy on English-Thai language identification.