The language component of the FASTY text prediction system

This paper describes the language component of FASTY, a text prediction system designed to improve text input efficiency for disabled users. The FASTY language component is based on state-of-the-art n-gram-based word-level and part-of-speech-level prediction and on a number of innovative modules (morphological analysis, collocation-based prediction, compound prediction) that are meant to enhance performance in languages other than English. Together with its modular architecture, these novel techniques make it adaptable to a wide range of languages without sacrificing performance. Currently, versions for Dutch, German, French, Italian, and Swedish are supported. The system can be parameterized to be used with different user interfaces and for a range of different applications. In this paper, we discuss each of the modules in detail and we present a series of experimental evaluations of the system.