TWO-HANDED TYPING METHOD ON AN ARBITRARY SURFACE

A computing device may detect user input, such as finger movements resembling typing on an invisible virtual keyboard in the air or on any surface, to enable typing. The computing device may use sensors (e.g., accelerometers, cameras, piezoelectric sensors, etc.) to detect the user’s finger movements, such as the user’s fingers moving through the air and/or contacting a surface. The computing device may then decode (or, in other words, convert, interpret, analyze, etc.) the detected finger movements to identify corresponding inputs representative of characters (e.g., alphanumeric characters, national characters, special characters, etc.). To reduce input errors, the computing device may decode the detected finger movements, at least in part, based on contextual information, such as preceding characters, words, and/or the like entered via previously detected user inputs. Similarly, the computing device may apply machine learning techniques and adjust parameters, such as a signal-to-noise ratio, to improve the accuracy of input-entry. In some examples, the computing device may implement specific recognition, prediction, and correction algorithms to improve the accuracy of input-entry. In this way, the computing device may accommodate biasing in finger movements that may be specific to a user entering the input

DPCSpell: A Transformer-based Detector-Purificator-Corrector Framework for Spelling Error Correction of Bangla and Resource Scarce Indic Languages

Spelling error correction is the task of identifying and rectifying misspelled words in texts. It is a potential and active research topic in Natural Language Processing because of numerous applications in human language understanding. The phonetically or visually similar yet semantically distinct characters make it an arduous task in any language. Earlier efforts on spelling error correction in Bangla and resource-scarce Indic languages focused on rule-based, statistical, and machine learning-based methods which we found rather inefficient. In particular, machine learning-based approaches, which exhibit superior performance to rule-based and statistical methods, are ineffective as they correct each character regardless of its appropriateness. In this work, we propose a novel detector-purificator-corrector framework based on denoising transformers by addressing previous issues. Moreover, we present a method for large-scale corpus creation from scratch which in turn resolves the resource limitation problem of any left-to-right scripted language. The empirical outcomes demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin for Bangla spelling error correction. The models and corpus are publicly available at https://tinyurl.com/DPCSpell.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, and 7 table

Optimizing the neural network training for OCR error correction of historical Hebrew texts

Over the past few decades, large archives of paper-based documents such as books and newspapers have been digitized using Optical Character Recognition. This technology is error-prone, especially for historical documents. To correct OCR errors, post-processing algorithms have been proposed based on natural language analysis and machine learning techniques such as neural networks. Neural network's disadvantage is the vast amount of manually labeled data required for training, which is often unavailable. This paper proposes an innovative method for training a light-weight neural network for Hebrew OCR post-correction using significantly less manually created data. The main research goal is to develop a method for automatically generating language and task-specific training data to improve the neural network results for OCR post-correction, and to investigate which type of dataset is the most effective for OCR post-correction of historical documents. To this end, a series of experiments using several datasets was conducted. The evaluation corpus was based on Hebrew newspapers from the JPress project. An analysis of historical OCRed newspapers was done to learn common language and corpus-specific OCR errors. We found that training the network using the proposed method is more effective than using randomly generated errors. The results also show that the performance of the neural net-work for OCR post-correction strongly depends on the genre and area of the training data. Moreover, neural networks that were trained with the proposed method outperform other state-of-the-art neural networks for OCR post-correction and complex spellcheckers. These results may have practical implications for many digital humanities projects

Intelligent Techniques to Accelerate Everyday Text Communication

People with some form of speech- or motor-impairments usually use a high-tech augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device to communicate with other people in writing or in face-to-face conversations. Their text entry rate on these devices is slow due to their motor abilities. Making good letter or word predictions can help accelerate the communication of such users. In this dissertation, we investigated several approaches to accelerate input for AAC users. First, considering that an AAC user is participating in a face-to-face conversation, we investigated whether performing speech recognition on the speaking-side can improve next word predictions. We compared the accuracy of three plausible microphone deployment options and the accuracy of two commercial speech recognition engines. We found that despite recognition word error rates of 7-16%, our ensemble of n-gram and recurrent neural network language models made predictions nearly as good as when they used the reference transcripts. In a user study with 160 participants, we also found that increasing number of prediction slots in a keyboard interface does not necessarily correlate to improved performance. Second, typing every character in a text message may require an AAC user more time or effort than strictly necessary. Skipping spaces or other characters may be able to speed input and reduce an AAC user\u27s physical input effort. We designed a recognizer optimized for expanding noisy abbreviated input where users often omitted spaces and mid-word vowels. We showed using neural language models for selecting conversational-style training text and for rescoring the recognizer\u27s n-best sentences improved accuracy. We found accurate abbreviated input was possible even if a third of characters was omitted. In a study where users had to dwell for a second on each key, we found sentence abbreviated input was competitive with a conventional keyboard with word predictions. Finally, AAC keyboards rely on language modeling to auto-correct noisy typing and to offer word predictions. While today language models can be trained on huge amounts of text, pre-trained models may fail to capture the unique writing style and vocabulary of individual users. We demonstrated improved performance compared to a unigram cache by adapting to a user\u27s text via language models based on prediction by partial match (PPM) and recurrent neural networks. Our best model ensemble increased keystroke savings by 9.6%