A Probabilistic Flexible Abbreviation Expansion System for Users With Motor Disabilities

In this paper we describe the initial design, training and evaluation of a prototype system enabling the automatic and flexible expansion of an abbreviated, typed text input, into a reconstructed sentence. The system’s target user group is cognitively unimpaired users with motor disabilities, for whom typing can be slow and tiring. It is intended that, by reducing the number of keystrokes required to generate a sentence, without imposing a rigid correspondence between abbreviation and full word, their typed communication might be made more comfortable and expansive. The system employs several techniques and statistics, including vowel deletion, phonetic replacement, and word truncation, extracted from two studies of the methods used by people in abbreviation. Encouraging initial results and evaluation are discussed, along with planned future work.