Transliteration Based Text Input Methods for Telugu

Telugu is the third most spoken language in India and one of the fifteen most spoken languages in the world. But, there is no standardized input method for Telugu, which has a widespread use. Since majority of users of Telugu typing tools on the computers are familiar with English, we propose a transliteration based text input method in which the users type Telugu using Roman script. We have shown that simple edit-distance based approach can give a light-weight system with good efficiency for a text input method. We have tested the approach with three datasets – general data, countries and places and person names. The approach has worked considerably well for all the datasets and holds promise as an efficient text input method.