Candidate Display Styles in Japanese Input
Xiangshi Ren, Kinya Tamura, Jing Kong, Shumin Zhai · 2003
Abstract: Typing Japanese into computers consists of typing Roman alphabet, displaying the kana character, converting kana to kanji, and selecting the intended kanji character from a list of homophonic candidates. This paper presents a study of four candidate display styles, three commonly used in commercial products (“vertical,” “horizontal, ” and “compact-horizontal”) and one novel (“matrix”), together with various manual selection methods (mouse, numeric key, spacebar, cursor key, numeric keypad and unrestricted input method). The results show that (1) when typing a single kanji character, about 70 % of total operation time is spent on choice selection; and (2) the “compact-horizontal ” and “matrix ” display styles are superior to the other display styles.