2026

Efficient text entry for complex writing systems like Chinese and Japanese necessitates the use of Input Method Editors (IMEs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as powerful, context-aware language resources for this task, we present a comprehensive benchmark and evaluation methodology to assess the viability of LLMs for next-generation IMEs. We conduct a comparative analysis of a diverse set of LLMs against established baseline methods on two core tasks: phonetic-to-character generation (using Pinyin and Romaji) and textual error correction. Our experiments demonstrate that top-tier LLMs achieve superior accuracy by leveraging deep contextual understanding, significantly outperforming traditional systems in ambiguity resolution and the correction of complex errors. However, our analysis also reveals a crucial trade-off between accuracy and computational efficiency across different models. The datasets, evaluation scripts, and results from this study serve as a vital public resource for future research, providing a robust baseline for developing and selecting models that balance performance with the low-latency demands of real-world text input.