WikiConference India 2016/Submissions/Advances in IME (Input Method Editor) and Testing challenges in Indic Languages

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User[edit]

Irfangreen

Type[edit]

Abstract[edit]

The term input method or input method editor, also abbreviated as IME refers to giving any input to an application in a computer or handheld device like mobile phone, tablet etc either through keyboard, mouse, voice, touch, handwriting or gesture based technologies. With the passage of time the computers and ubiquitous devices including mobile phones gaming devices and tablets are very much parts and parcel of our daily lives. and the number of people who have access to them is skyrocketing particularly in developing countries or new emerging markets like India. The challenge is people in emerging markets still cannot type their native language characters directly or as easily as they do with roman and other latin based languages. challenges also lie in mapping shortcut keys and other control items because of the linguistic complexities in these scripts such as diacritics, neutral characters, ligatures, digits, joiners, non joiners, Halant, Vattu, Chillu and other special characters. Due to budget constraint most of the companies also rely on open source third party tools and plugins for lexical functionalities like proofreading, hyphenation and spell check-ins that makes application lot more buggy and unstable. A lot of technical and business innovations are also happening day in, day out to make text inputs in native Indic scripts easy for millions of people in India, through artificial intelligence, emotion detection, adaptive software keyboard, word prediction and auto spell correction to name a few. This paper tries to decode the real life testing challenges in these areas and will give industry experiences based on the scripts of similar languages like MENA (Arabic & Hebrew) and Japanese.

Interested participants and comments[edit]