Suppose you are on a mobile device with no keyboard (e.g., a cell or PDA). How can you enter text quickly? T9? Graffiti? This demo will show how language modeling can be used to speed up data entry, both in the mobile context, as well as the desk-top. The Wild Thing encourages users to use wildcards (*). A language model finds the k-best expansions. Users quickly figure out when they can get away with wildcards. General purpose trigram language models are effective for the general case (unrestricted text), but there are important special cases like searching over popular web queries, where more restricted language models are even more effective.
['Kenneth Ward Church', 'Bo Thiesson']
The Wild Thing