Candidate Display Styles in Japanese Input

: Typing Japanese into computers consists of typing Roman alphabet, displaying the kana character, converting kana to kanji, and selecting the intended kanji character from a list of homophonic candidates. This paper presents a study of four candidate display styles, three commonly used in commercial products (“vertical,” “horizontal,” and “compact-horizontal”) and one novel (“matrix”), together with various manual selection methods (mouse, numeric key, spacebar, cursor key, numeric keypad and unrestricted input method). The results show that (1) when typing a single kanji character, about 70% of total operation time is spent on choice selection; and (2) the “compact-horizontal” and “matrix” display styles are superior to the other display styles.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: INTERACT
• Authors: Xiangshi Ren, Kinya Tamura, Jing Kong, Shumin Zhai
• Keywords: Display Styles, Intended Kanji Character, INTERACT 2003, INTERACT 2007, Kanji Character