Abstract
Computer users increasingly need to produce text written in multiple languages. However, typical computer systems require the user to change the text entry software each time a different language is used. This is cumbersome, especially when the languages change frequently. To solve this problem, we propose TypeAny, a novel multilingual text entry system that identifies the language of the user's key entry and automatically dispatches the input to the appropriate text entry system. This language identification is modeled as a hidden Markov model whose probability is estimated by using the PPM method. When evaluating this method, we obtained language identification accuracy of 96.7% when an appropriate language had to be chosen from among three languages. The number of control actions needed to switch languages was decreased 93% when using TypeAny rather than a conventional method.
