Evaluating the effect of phrase set in Hindi text entry

Abstract

Recently, many different Indic text entry mechanisms have been proposed and evaluated. Whereas the use of a common phrase set across text-entry research may help to produce generalizable results across studies, previous Indic Text entry evaluations have used a variety of different text entry phrases. In this paper, we develop and evaluate three different types of Hindi phrase sets that have been previously used in the literature - Hindi films, a grade VII textbook and a translated version of MacKenzie and Soukoreff's phrases - to study effects of their characteristics on performance. No statistical difference was found in novice user performance due to the different phrase sets. However, based on participant feedback, we report that consideration should be taken with regards to phrase length, frequency, understandability, and memorability in the design and selection of text-entry phrases. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.