Bug#468820: ITP: soothsayer -- intelligent predictive text entry platform (tools and demos)

[Matteo Vescovi <matteo.vescovi@yahoo.co.uk>]

On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 07:36:43PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Matteo Vescovi:
> 
> >  Soothsayer is an intelligent predictive text entry platform.
> >  .
> >  A predictive text entry system attempts to improve the ease and speed
> >  of textual input by predicting words. Word prediction consists in
> >  computing which word tokens or word completions are most likely to be
> >  entered next. The system analyses the text already entered and
> >  combines the information thus extracted with other information sources
> >  to calculate the set of most probable tokens.
> 
> How is this program related to dasher?

Dasher is an excellent piece of software. While dasher and soothsayer
are both predictive text entry systems, the main differences are:

 - character vs. word prediction: dasher predicts the next character,
   while soothsayer predicts the next word. That is, a prediction in
   dasher consists of a probability assignment to the next possible
   characters, given the text entered so far; whereas a prediction in
   soothsayer consists of a probability assignment to the next possible
   words.
 - dasher has a graphical user interface, whereas soothsayer only aims
   to provide a predictive text entry library, that other applications
   can link to to provide predictive text entry capabilities.


The language model used by soothsayer is designed to be extensible and
configurable, allowing new predictive plugins to be plugged into its
core, to extend its predictive capabilities to use syntactic and
semantical information sources, effectively modifying the language
model used to generate predictions (currently, only statistical
plugins are implemented).


Cheers,
- Matteo