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Word Prediction

The original purpose of word prediction software was to help people with physical disabilities increase their typing speed, as well as to help them decrease the number of keystrokes needed in order to complete a word or a sentence. The need to increase speed is noted by the fact that people who use speech generating devices generally produce speech at a rate that is less than 10% as fast as people who use oral speech. 

In one form of word prediction, word completion as the writer selects the first letter or letters of a word, the program predicts one or more possible words as choices. If the word that the user wants is not predicted, the writer must enter the next letter of the word. At this time, the word choice(s) is altered so that the words provided begin with the same letters as those that have been selected. When the word that the user wants appears it is selected, and the word is inserted into the text. In another form of word prediction, words most likely to follow the just written one are predicted, based on recent word pairs used. Word prediction uses language modeling, where within a set vocabulary the words are most likely to occur are calculated. Along with language modeling, basic word prediction on AAC devices is often coupled with a recency model, where words that are used more frequently by the AAC user are more likely to be predicted. Word prediction software often also allows the user to enter their own words into the word prediction dictionaries either directly, or by "learning" words that have been written.

Total number of applications: 4