Acquiring Vocabulary for Predictive Text Entry through Dynamic Reuse of a Small User Corpus

As mobile computing and communications have become popular, predictive text entry systems have become an increasingly important technology. Existing methods still need refinement, though, with respect to personalization, especially how to acquire vocabulary not pre-registered in the system dictionary. In this paper, we report on an automatic method that dynamically obtains a user specific vocabulary from the user's unanalyzed documents. When a user makes an entry, the system dynamically extracts the corresponding chunks from the user text and suggests them along with words suggested by the dictionary. With our method, texts in a particular style or concerning a specific domain can be entered using a predictive text entry system. We verified that a large amount of words not registered in the dictionary can be entered using our method.