Mobile Keyboard Input Decoding with Finite-State Transducers

Understand

We propose a finite-state transducer (FST) representation for the models used to decode keyboard inputs on mobile devices.

• Drawing from learnings from the field of speech recognition, we describe a decoding framework that can satisfy the strict memory and latency constraints of keyboard input.
• We extend this framework to support functionalities typically not present in speech recognition, such as literal decoding, autocorrections, word completions, and next word predictions.
• We describe the general framework of what we call for short the keyboard "FST decoder" as well as the implementation details that are new compared to a speech FST decoder.