Using pictographic representation, syntactic information and gestures in text entry

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of touch screen mobile devices, it is becoming increasingly important to design fast and reliable methods for text input on such devices. In this work, we exploit the capabilities of those devices and a specific language model to enhance the efficiency of text entry tasks. We will distribute the roles between the user and the device in a way that allocates the tasks to the side where they can be efficiently done. The user is not a good processor of syntactic and memory retrieval operations but she/he is a highly efficient processor for handling semantic and pattern recognition operations. The reverse is true for computational devices. These facts are exploited in two designs for the entry of common words which represent a high percentage of our written and spoken materials. A common word is typed in two or three clicks, with or without a gesture on a touch screen. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.