Next Word Predictor: Shiny App
Chiara Di Gravio
December 19, 2016
Introduction
SwiftKey builds smart keyboard that makes it easier for people to type on their mobile phone. The idea is to use predictive text models; hence, if a use type:
There is a
the keyboard will three options for what the next word might be. We built a predictive model using a series of sentences from Twitter, news and blogs (all downloaded from the Coursera website) and used to build a unique corpus.
The Algorithm
We used the stupid back-off algorithm as it was not computationally intensive and gives results quickly.
The stupid back-off algorithm is an n-grams language model that assigns the probability of a word conditioned on previous words. The main idea of the stupid back-off algorithm is to look at a higher order n-grmas, if this has zero count, we then look at the lower order n-grams, and we continue this procedures until we get the most common words.
The back-off does not produce normalised probabilities but uses relative frequencies assigned to each word.
The App: How to use it?
In the box named “Type Here”, insert the word or the sentence of interest.
Press the Submit button.
The app will output the 3 most likely words, as well as a histogram of the most likely words you could choose from
If you want to write a new sentence or if you want to update the one you have already typed, just change the text input and press Submit.
The app will no update if you do not press Submit!
Link to the App
The app can be found here.
