Handheld electronic device with text disambiguation
View Patent ↗An improved handheld electronic device includes a keypad in the form of a reduced QWERTY keyboard and is enabled with disambiguation software. As a user enters keystrokes, the device provides output in the form of a default output and a number of variants from which a user can choose. The output is based largely upon the frequency, i.e., the likelihood that a user intended a particular output, but various features of the device provide additional variants that are not based solely on frequency and rather are provided by various logic structures resident on the device. The device enables editing during text entry, and when initiating an activity session on a word such as during editing, the display outputs variants of the entire word being edited, rather than providing as variants only those parts of a word that are being edited.
1. A method of enabling input into a handheld electronic device, the handheld electronic device including an input apparatus, an output apparatus, and a processor apparatus, the input apparatus including a number of input members, the number of input members including a number of linguistic input members, each linguistic input member of at least a portion of the number of linguistic input members having a plurality of linguistic elements assigned thereto, the processor apparatus including a processor and a memory, the memory including a disambiguation routine that is adapted to provide a disambiguation function, the output apparatus including a display, the method comprising:
outputting on the display one or more linguistic objects;
detecting a movement input and, responsive thereto, moving a cursor to a location adjacent a linguistic element of a linguistic object on the display that comprises a number of linguistic elements;
detecting as a number of editing inputs on said linguistic object at the location of the cursor at least one of:
one or more deletion inputs as to one or more of the linguistic elements of the linguistic object, and
a number of actuations of one or more of said input members having a plurality of linguistic elements assigned thereto;
employing as context in a disambiguation function a group of non-edited linguistic elements consisting of the linguistic elements of the language object but not including any linguistic element that was the subject of a deletion input by subjecting the non-edited linguistic elements and the number of actuations of the one or more input members to the disambiguation routine to generate a number of further linguistic objects, at least some of the further linguistic objects each comprising the non-edited linguistic elements and a linguistic element assigned to each of the one or more input members; and
outputting on the display one or more of the further linguistic objects.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising outputting on the display as the one or more further linguistic objects a number of further linguistic objects that are obtained based upon the context of at least one of a possible prefix and a possible suffix from said linguistic object.
3. A handheld electronic device comprising:
an input apparatus;
an output apparatus; and
a processor apparatus;
the input apparatus including a number of input members, the number of input members including a number of linguistic input members, each linguistic input member of at least a portion of the number of linguistic input members having a plurality of linguistic elements assigned thereto;
the processor apparatus including a processor and a memory, the memory including a disambiguation routine that is adapted to provide a disambiguation function;
the output apparatus including a display;
the processor being adapted to output on the display one or more linguistic objects;
the processor being adapted to detect a movement input and, responsive thereto, to move a cursor to a location adjacent a linguistic element of a linguistic object on the display that comprises a number of linguistic elements;
the processor being adapted to detect as a number of editing inputs on said linguistic object at the location of the cursor at least one of:
one or more deletion inputs as to one or more of the linguistic elements of the linguistic object, and
a number of actuations of one or more of said input members having a plurality of linguistic elements assigned thereto;
the processor being adapted to employ as context in a disambiguation function a group of non-edited linguistic elements consisting of the linguistic elements of the language object but not including any linguistic element that was the subject of a deletion input by subjecting the non-edited linguistic elements and the number of actuations of the one or more input members to the disambiguation routine to generate a number of further linguistic objects, at least some of the further linguistic objects each comprising the non-edited linguistic elements and a linguistic element assigned to each of the one or more input members; and
the processor being adapted to output on the display one or more of the further linguistic objects.