Joint Transformer/RNN Architecture for Gesture Typing in Indic Languages

Emil Biju, Anirudh Sriram, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pratyush Kumar


Abstract
Gesture typing is a method of typing words on a touch-based keyboard by creating a continuous trace passing through the relevant keys. This work is aimed at developing a keyboard that supports gesture typing in Indic languages. We begin by noting that when dealing with Indic languages, one needs to cater to two different sets of users: (i) users who prefer to type in the native Indic script (Devanagari, Bengali, etc.) and (ii) users who prefer to type in the English script but want the transliterated output in the native script. In both cases, we need a model that takes a trace as input and maps it to the intended word. To enable the development of these models, we create and release two datasets. First, we create a dataset containing keyboard traces for 193,658 words from 7 Indic languages. Second, we curate 104,412 English-Indic transliteration pairs from Wikidata across these languages. Using these datasets we build a model that performs path decoding, transliteration and transliteration correction. Unlike prior approaches, our proposed model does not make co-character independence assumptions during decoding. The overall accuracy of our model across the 7 languages varies from 70-95%.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.87
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
999–1010
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.87
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.87
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emil Biju, Anirudh Sriram, Mitesh M. Khapra, and Pratyush Kumar. 2020. Joint Transformer/RNN Architecture for Gesture Typing in Indic Languages. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 999–1010, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Joint Transformer/RNN Architecture for Gesture Typing in Indic Languages (Biju et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.87.pdf