Collocated with

the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

15th December 2012, Mumbai, India

Workshop Program

Venue: Victor Menezes Convention Centre, Seminar Hall - 2 on first floor (VMCC SH-21)

Invited Talks

WTIM-2 will feature two invited talks by eminent engineers from the industry who have made text inputs in native scripts easy for millions of people through technical and business innovations:

SwiftKey: Building a commercial success upon firm theoretical foundations by Paul Butcher, SwiftKey

At the heart of SwiftKey's success are well motivated Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing principles. But that foundation is only the start, it's also required relentless focus on User Experience, solving endless real world issues and building and connecting with the vibrant community of SwiftKey users worldwide.

This talk will take you through the story of how we turned a great IME into the most successful paid Android application in the world.

Paul is Chief Software Architect of NLP company SwiftKey, creators of the market-leading input method by the same name.

Quillpad Multilingual Predictive Transliteration System by Ram Prakash H, Tachyon Technologies

Transliteration has been one of the common methods for multilingual text input. Many earlier methods employed transliteration schemes for defining one to one mapping of input alphabet combinations to output alphabet combinations. Though such well defined mappings made it easier to write a transliteration program, the end user was burdened with learning the mappings. Further, though transliteration schemes try to map the alphabet combinations phonetically, it is unavoidable to introduce non intuitive combinations into the scheme. An alternative is to use predictive transliteration, where user could input a word, by intuitively combining the input alphabet phonetically and the predictive transliteration system should correctly convert it to the target language. In this talk, I will present the challenges that must be addressed by such a system, and describe how Quillpad can be trained for performing predictive transliteration between any two alphabets.

Ram Prakash is the founder of Tachyon Technologies, and developper of Quillpad, the first online Indian language phonetic transliteration based input system. He was listed as one of the twenty MIT TR-35 2010 Young Innovators from India for Quillpad. 

Accepted Papers

Long Research Papers

AN ENSEMBLE MODEL OF WORD-BASED AND CHARACTER-BASED MODELS FOR JAPANESE AND CHINESE INPUT METHOD
Yoh Okuno and Shinsuke Mori 

MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION FOR EFFICIENT BRAHMIC KEYBOARDS
Albert Brouillette, Devraj Sarmah and Jugal Kalita

PHLOAT : INTEGRATED WRITING ENVIRONMENT FOR ESL LEARNERS
Yuta Hayashibe, Masato Hagiwara and Satoshi Sekine

STATISTICAL INPUT METHOD BASED ON A PHRASE CLASS N-GRAM MODEL
Hirokuni Maeta and Shinsuke Mori

USING K-MEANS CLUSTERING TO IMPROVE THE N-POS MODEL FOR JAPANESE IME
Long Chen, Xianchao Wu and Jingzhou He

Short Research/Demo Papers

FORWARD TRANSLITERATION OF DZONGKHA TEXT TO BRAILLE
Tirthankar Dasgupta, Manjira Sinha and Anupam Basu

BANGLA PHONETIC INPUT METHOD WITH FOREIGN WORDS HANDLING
Khan Md. Anwarus Salam, Nishino Tetsuro and Setsuo Yamada

LUITPAD: A FULLY UNICODE COMPATIBLE ASSAMESE WRITING SOFTWARE
Navanath Saharia and Kishori M. Konwar  

ROMANIZED ARABIC TRANSLITERATION
Achraf Chalabi and Hany Gerges

Workshop Description

Methods of text input have entered a new era. The number of people who have access to computers and mobile devices is sky-rocketing in regions where people cannot type their native language characters directly. It has also become commonplace to input text not only through a keyboard but also through other different modes such as voice, hand-writing, multi-touch or gesture recognition. Multimodal interfaces that combine soft keyboards with gestures or speech are also becoming mainstream.

Even when people type with a keyboard, it is done differently from a few years ago - an adaptive software keyboard, word prediction and spell correction are just a few examples of such recent changes in text input experience. Furthermore, clever and forgiving design of user interfaces for text input has become an important research topic, especially given the array of sensors and actuators available on today’s mobile devices. Given the overall trend towards multi-tasking in everyday life, “eyes-free” text input methods that do not require constant visual attention are becoming increasingly important.

These new challenges have many underlying NLP problems in common. For example, a high quality dictionary is called for, but it is far from obvious how to construct and maintain one. A dictionary also needs to be stored in some data structure, whose optimal designs may depend upon the usage. Prediction and spell correction can be very annoying if they are not smart enough. For many applications, user input can be very noisy (imagine voice recognition or typing on a small screen), so the input methods must be robust against such noise. Finally, there is no standard data set or evaluation metric, which is necessary for quantitative analysis of user input experience.

This workshop is a sequel to the first Workshop on Advances in Text Input Methods that was organized in conjunction with IJCNLP 2011. The success of the previous workshop and the overwhelming response and encouragement from the community motivate us to organize WTIM2, whose goals are similar to that of WTIM1, which is to bring together the developers and researchers of input technologies around the world, and share their innovations, research findings and issues across different applications, devices, modes and languages. We hope that the workshop will deepen our understanding of the field as a whole, and facilitate further innovation in each application area.

Topics

We welcome submission on a wide range of topics and languages related to text input systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Roman script based phonetic input and soft keyboards for languages using non-Roman scripts
• Transliteration-based approaches for phonetic text input
• Input for soft keyboards and devices with hardware limitations and small form factors, such as mobile phones, game devices, tablet PCs.
• Multimodal input and output: text input via speech, handwriting and/or touch gestures; audio and haptic feedback.
• Input methods for users with special needs
• Predictive input technologies: auto-completion, next word prediction and spell correction for text input
• Personalization and customization of input methods
• User feedback and community-specific data: understanding the user and usage for a better user experience, collection and analysis of user generated phonetic inputs
• Research and practice of rule-based and/or statistical input methods
• Measuring user experience in text input
• Creation of data and resources for evaluation of input systems
• Issues in commercial input engine deployment: data compression, cloud-based input, etc.

Important Dates

• 7th October, 2012 (11:59pm Samoa time, UTC-11): Extended paper submission deadline
• 31st October, 2012: Paper accept/reject notification
• 7th November, 2012: Camera ready paper due
• 15th December: Workshop

Call for Papers

We invite both short and long research papers, opinion and position papers and demo proposals on text input methods. Please see below for submission instructions. The complete CFP can be downloaded from the following links: pdf, txt

Submission Information

Paper submission to WTIM 2012 will be accepted on or before October 7^th, 2012 (Midnight Samoa time, UTC-11) in PDF format via the START system. The submission link is: https://www.softconf.com/coling2012/WTIM02/

Submissions should follow the instructions at the COLING website (http://www.coling2012-iitb.org/call_for_papers.php). Please use the following style files for formatting your submissions: Latex style files, Microsoft Word style files

Long papers should not exceed 14 pages of content plus additional 2 pages for references, and should report original unpublished research.

Short papers on work in progress, an opinion piece or position paper, or proposals for system demonstrations are also welcome. Short papers should not exceed 6 pages plus additional 2 pages for references. Short paper on system demonstration proposal should describe the system to be demonstrated, outline its components and working, and mention special needs if any for setting up the demonstration. On the submission page, you will be prompted to select an appropriate category for your paper: long research paper, short research paper, short position/opinion paper, demonstration proposal.

Reviewing: Each long/short paper will be reviewed by three/two members from the program committee. The final selection will be made by the committee based on the reports of the reviewers. We will follow a double blind reviewing policy. Therefore, all submissions should be anonymous. Please, do not put any information that can potentially reveal the identity of the author.

Dual submission policy: Authors can submit papers that are under review or has been submitted to another conference/workshop. However, upon acceptance of the paper, the authors have to decide whether they want to present the paper at WTIM or another forum.

Presentation and Participation: At least one of the authors MUST register for the workshop to ensure the inclusion of the paper in the proceedings. It is also expected that at least one author for each accepted submission personally attends and presents the work at the workshop. There will be both oral and poster presentations. The mode of presentation will be decided later based on the suggestion of the program committee and has nothing to do with the technical quality of the paper.

Committees

Program Committee

• Achraf Chalabi (Microsoft ATLC, Egypt)
• Hiroshi Manabe (Self-employed)
• Hiroyuki Tokunaga (Preferred Infrastructure)
• Hisami Suzuki (Microsoft Research Redmond)
• Jugal Kalita (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
• Jun Hatori (Apple)
• Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Bombay)
• Richa (LDC-IL, Central Institute of Indian Languages Mysore)
• Samit Bhattacharya (IIT Guwahati)
• Sarvnaz Karimi (CSIRO, Sydney)
• Shinsuke Mori (Kyoto University)
• Sriganesh Madhvanath (HP Labs, India)
• Taku Kudo (Google Japan)
• Tim Paek (Microsoft Research, Redmond)
• Vasudeva Varma (IIIT Hyderabad)
• Virach Sornlertlamvanich (NECTEC)
• Xianchao Wu (Baidu)

Organizing Co-chairs

• Kalika Bali (Microsoft Research Lab India)
• Monojit Choudhury (Microsoft Research Lab India)
• Yoh Okuno (Swiftkey)

Contact

For any clarification, questions or suggestions, please contact: wtim <at> microsoft.com

Past Workshops

First Workshop in Advances in Text Input Methods (WTIM 1) in conjunction with IJCNLP 2011

Latest News

November 28, 2012: The final program is online.

November 6, 2012: List of accepted papers and invited talks are online now.

September 21, 2012: Submission deadline has been extended till 7th October 2012.

September 17, 2012: Submissions open for WTIM-2. Please submit your papers through the following link: https://www.softconf.com/coling2012/WTIM02/

August 1, 2012: First call for paper for WTIM 2012 has been announced.

Quick Links

InvitedTalks

Accepted Papers

Workshop Description

Topics

Important Dates

Call for Paper

Submission Information

Committees

Contact

Past Workshops