A Proposal of a Japanese Input System for Mobile Terminals Enhanced by the Word Forecast Function Based on the Location Information

Abstract

Mobile terminals are now very familiar electronic devises for our daily life. Especially, the usage of the mobile phone keeps expanding year by year. And, the use of e-mail function came to the first place surpassing the call function on the present mobile phones. The importance of the Japanese input system increased in connection with it. In this paper, the speed of the character input is accelerated by increasing the predictive accuracy of the Japanese characters input function. The purpose of our research is to display words frequently input in the present location in the high rank of the forecast candidate’s list, and improve the character input efficiency. The system is composed of two component systems. One is the Japanese-language input system "CocoIME" that operates on the user’s Android terminal. Another one is the automatic dictionary generation system "KNDS" that operates on the server. We conduct a preliminary experiment to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed CocoIME input system and discuss analyses and remaining future works.KeywordsJapanese input systemMobile phoneWord predictionLocation informationGPS