CHIME: An Efficient Error-Tolerant Chinese Pinyin Input Method

Abstract

Chinese Pinyin input methods are very important for Chinese language processing. In many cases, users may make typing errors. For example, a user wants to type in "shenme" (什么, meaning "what" in English) but may type in "shenem" instead. Existing Pinyin input methods fail in converting such a Pinyin sequence with errors to the right Chinese words. To solve this problem, we developed an efficient error-tolerant Pinyin input method called "CHIME" that can handle typing errors. By incorporating state-of-the-art techniques and language-specific features, the method achieves a better performance than state-of-the-art input methods. It can efficiently find relevant words in milliseconds for an input Pinyin sequence.

Framework

For an input Pinyin sequence with typing errrors, CHIME works in three steps:

• Detect mistyped Pinyins that are not included in the predefined Pinyin dictionary.

• For each mistyped Pinyin, CHIME find top-k similar candidate Pinyins.

• CHIME converts the corrected Pinyin sequence to the most likely sequence of Chinese words.

Evaluation Dataset

Bellow are the datasets used in the study. (To see the text properly in your browser, please make sure to change the encoding of your browser to UTF-8.)

• inputPinyin: contains the 2,000 input Pinyin sequences (679 sequences contain at least one typo).

• outputHanzi: contains the corresponding Chinese word sequences that users intend to type in.

• SogouResult: contains the conversion results from Sogou.

• CHIMEResult: contains the conversion results from CHIME.

Acknowledgments

Most of the work was done while Yabin Zheng was visiting UCI. We thank Alexander Behm and Shengyue Ji for their insightful discussions at UCI. This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60873174 and 60828004).