Let Your Fingers do the Spelling: Implicit disambiguation of words spelled with the telephone keypad

One way to enter words into an interactive computer system is to spell them with the letters on a telephone keypad. Although each button has three letters, the system designer can often supply the system with enough additional information that it can select the intended word without additional input from the user. This is called implicit disambiguation. This paper examines the obstacles to implicit disambiguation and describes two di erent kinds of knowledge that can make it possible.