Multilingual Text Entry using Automatic Language Detection.
Yo Ehara, Kumiko Tanaka‐Ishii · 2008
Computer users increasingly need to pro-duce text written in multiple languages. However, typical computer interfaces re-quire the user to change the text entry soft-ware each time a different language is used. This is cumbersome, especially when lan-guage changes are frequent. To solve this problem, we propose TypeAny, a novel front-end interface that detects the language of the user’s key entry and au-tomatically dispatches the input to the ap-propriate text entry system. Unlike previ-ously reported methods, TypeAny can han-dle more than two languages, and can easily support any new language even if the avail-able corpus is small. When evaluating this method, we obtained language detection accuracy of 96.7 % when an appropriate language had to be chosen from among three languages. The number of control actions needed to switch languages was decreased over 93 % when using Ty-peAny rather than a conventional method. 1