Automatic Keyboard Layout Design for Low-Resource Latin-Script Languages
This addresses the barrier to online communication for speakers of low-resource languages by providing accessible typing tools, though it is incremental as it builds on existing keyboard design concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of missing keyboard layouts for low-resource Latin-script languages by developing an automatic design approach that requires minimal data and human effort, enabling scalable creation of input tools.
We present our approach to automatically designing and implementing keyboard layouts on mobile devices for typing low-resource languages written in the Latin script. For many speakers, one of the barriers in accessing and creating text content on the web is the absence of input tools for their language. Ease in typing in these languages would lower technological barriers to online communication and collaboration, likely leading to the creation of more web content. Unfortunately, it can be time-consuming to develop layouts manually even for language communities that use a keyboard layout very similar to English; starting from scratch requires many configuration files to describe multiple possible behaviors for each key. With our approach, we only need a small amount of data in each language to generate keyboard layouts with very little human effort. This process can help serve speakers of low-resource languages in a scalable way, allowing us to develop input tools for more languages. Having input tools that reflect the linguistic diversity of the world will let as many people as possible use technology to learn, communicate, and express themselves in their own native languages.