Design and evaluation of a versatile architecture for a multilingual word prediction system

Abstract

Word prediction is a process that tries to guess the word a user is writing, at the same time he/she is doing it. It is mainly used to decrease the effort needed to write a text in applications devoted to people with disabilities. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the architecture of a multilingual word prediction system. The proposed architecture is modular and flexible, with common interfaces between the modules to allow the use of different prediction algorithms or even the prediction in different languages. The current system consists of a general lexicon for each language, the possibility to create and store personal lexicons, prediction methods based on words and POS (parts of speech) probabilistic grammars (when available). The system has been trained and evaluated for English, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The Spanish version is currently included in a technical aid widely used for people with communication disabilities. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.