The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20130517215753/http://mikhas.posterous.com/tag/presage

Thoughts 'n Stuff

 

Multi word ribbon UI for Maliit (video)

Motivated by the new Blackberry 10 virtual keyboard, I decided to spent a couple of hours on a proof of concept, this video being the result.

I had to hack the Presage engine a bit to provide word prediction in a similar fashion to what you see in the 2-3 seconds of the Blackberry video. Then I added some space between the rows of the keyboard, so that I could place additional word ribbons there. The word candidates appear next to their starting letters, though it’s only one candidate per letter. I need to find a better solution here, but then again Blackberry guys also haven’t solved it either ;–) Tapping on the word candidates inserts then into the text editor (no gestures, for now).

The code is very hackish, certainly nothing I would publish. I am going to put it onto a tablet so that I can show it around to you guys at the TiZen Developer Conference or the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Jon is going to bring a camcorder on Sunday, so perhaps we can actually record a real, youtube-worthy video then.

Filed under  //   Blackberry   Input methods   Maliit   Presage   TiZen   Ubuntu  
Posted May 4, 2012
 

Maliit Keyboard now with word prediction and error correction (video)

This is a feature that I personally wanted for a long time. Interrupted by FOSDEM, some Wayland research and many other things, I finally managed to get word prediction and error correction beyond prototype quality. The video shows just how amazingly good the Presage word prediction can be, even without extensive training (in fact, for the video we used the minimal language model training that comes with a regular Presage installation). The second part of the video shows how combining Presage with a spellchecker such as Hunspell further improves the provided word candidates.

Presage uses a very scalable approach called text n-grams. There is a lot of research in that area, but language models of contemporary language usage are either well guarded or cannot be freely distributed. Luckily, Presage comes with training tools such as text2ngram. Users can feed arbitrary language corpora to it, though one should be careful to perhaps not mix different languages too much.

Matteo Vescovi, the author of Presage (formerly known as Soothsayer), started the work as part of his master thesis a couple of years ago. The heart of Presage are the different predictors. They can be queried in parallel and the result lists are merged, using probability analysis.

Presage certainly has a lot of potential. It comes with an easy to use C++ API but also provides bindings for C and Python. In fact, it even provides a D-Bus API, which would make it possible to run it as a system service. The user could then benefit from (and train!) the same language models from different applications.

Hunspell probably doesn’t need much introduction. It is used in many Linux desktops. It’s a fine library and comes with many dictionaries. However, one should be aware that Hunspell itself cannot provide word prediction, which is why it wasn’t enough for mobile text input. As a fallback for Presage, it works very well though.

Of course there are a couple of things we could do from here. As Jon mentioned in the video, the virtual keyboard’s word ribbon UI could host word suggestions from other applications, such as the Google search in the browser. For Unity’s dasher input or Gnome Shell’s search, the application names could be shown instead. Or we could hook it up to Bash completion.

PS: Anyone up to package Presage for Fremantle or Nemo? It could be pretty interesting to see the next release of Maliit running on the N900.

Filed under  //   Hunspell   Input methods   Maemo   Maliit   Openismus   Presage  
Posted March 30, 2012