Six-digit stroke-based Chinese input method

Abstract

During the last three decades, more than one thousand Chinese input methods have been developed. However, people are still looking for better input methods in terms of easy to use, easy to remember, high input speed and small keypad implementation on handheld devices. The well-known stroke-based Chinese input method using only five basic stroke types could achieve low learning curve and small numeric keypad implementation but its input speed is limited for complex Chinese characters with a lot of strokes. To tackle this problem, simplified stroke-based Chinese character and phrase coding methods using (3+3) rules are proposed in this paper. The proposed method only uses the first 3 stroke codes and the last 3 stroke codes to represent the first and last radical information of the character for achieving lower average code length and higher hit rate of first character on the candidate list. To further enhance the input speed, a very user-friendly (3+3) phrase coding rule is also proposed for inputting Chinese phrases in terms of 2-character, 3-character and long-character phrases. Three special key assignment designs are developed for practical implementation of the proposed Chinese character and phrase input method using conventional QWERTY keyboard, PC's numeric keypad and mobile phone 12-key keypad. Experimental results have shown that the proposed character coding can achieve lower average code length and higher hit rate of first character as compared with conventional stroke-based method and some well-known Chinese input methods. The proposed coding rules are also very easy to use and remember.