The Wild Thing

Suppose you are on a mobile device with no keyboard (e.g., a cell or PDA). How can you enter text quickly? T9? Graffiti? This demo will show how language modeling can be used to speed up data entry, both in the mobile context, as well as the desktop. The Wild Thing encourages users to use wildcards (*). A language model finds the k-best expansions. Users quickly figure out when they can get away with wildcards. General purpose trigram language models are effective for the general case (unrestricted text), but there are important special cases like searching over popular web queries, where more restricted language models are even more effective. 1 Motivation: Phone App Cell phones and PDAs are everywhere. Users love mobility. What are people doing with their phone? You’d think they would be talking on their phones, but a lot of people are typing. It is considered rude to talk on a cell in certain public places, especially in Europe and Asia. SMS text messaging enables people to communicate, even when they can’t talk. It is bizarre that people are typing on their phones given how painful it is. “Talking on the phone” is a collocation, but “typing on the phone” is not. Slate (slate.msn.com/id/2111773) recently ran a story titled: “A Phone You Can Actually Type On” with the lead: “If you've tried to zap someone a text message recently, you've probably discovered the huge drawback of typing on your cell phone. Unless you're one of those cyborg Scandinavian teenagers who was born with a Nokia in his hand, pecking out even a simple message is a thumb-twisting chore.” There are great hopes that speech recognition will someday make it unnecessary to type on your phone (for SMS or any other app), but speech recognition won’t help with the rudeness issue. If people are typing because they can’t talk, then speech recognition is not an option. Fortunately, the speech community has developed powerful language modeling techniques that can help even when speech is not an option. 2 K-Best String Matching Suppose we want to search for MSN using a cell phone. A standard approach would be to type 6 777 66, where 6 M, 777 S and 66 N. (The pauses are necessary for disambiguation.) Kids these days are pretty good at typing this way, but there has to be a better solution. T9 (www.t9.com) is an interesting alternative. The user types 676 (for MSN). The system uses a (unigram) language model to find the k-best matches. The user selects MSN from this list. Some users love T9, and some don’t. The input, 676, can be thought of as short hand for the regular expression: /^[6MNOmno][7PRSprs][6MNOmno]$/ using standard Unix notation. Regular expressions become much more interesting when we consider wildcards. So-called “word wheeling” can be thought of as the special case where we add a wildcard to the end of whatever the user types. Thus, if the user types 676 (for MSN), we would find the k-best matches for: /^[6MNOmno][7PRSprs][6MNOmno].*/