Sequential Decision-Making for Inline Text Autocomplete
This work addresses the problem of reducing cognitive load for users in text entry systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing autocomplete methods with a new formulation.
The paper tackled the problem of improving inline autocomplete suggestions by considering cognitive load through a sequential decision-making formulation using reinforcement learning, resulting in evidence that this approach provides better suggestion policies than single-step reasoning under certain objectives.
Autocomplete suggestions are fundamental to modern text entry systems, with applications in domains such as messaging and email composition. Typically, autocomplete suggestions are generated from a language model with a confidence threshold. However, this threshold does not directly take into account the cognitive load imposed on the user by surfacing suggestions, such as the effort to switch contexts from typing to reading the suggestion, and the time to decide whether to accept the suggestion. In this paper, we study the problem of improving inline autocomplete suggestions in text entry systems via a sequential decision-making formulation, and use reinforcement learning to learn suggestion policies through repeated interactions with a target user over time. This formulation allows us to factor cognitive load into the objective of training an autocomplete model, through a reward function based on text entry speed. We acquired theoretical and experimental evidence that, under certain objectives, the sequential decision-making formulation of the autocomplete problem provides a better suggestion policy than myopic single-step reasoning. However, aligning these objectives with real users requires further exploration. In particular, we hypothesize that the objectives under which sequential decision-making can improve autocomplete systems are not tailored solely to text entry speed, but more broadly to metrics such as user satisfaction and convenience.