An Algorithm of Reducing the Number of Keystrokes for Chinese Phonetic Symbols

Abstract

The input elements of a Chinese phonetic input method are 41 phonetic symbols, which are mapped to four rows of keystrokes. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for reducing the number of keystrokes for these phonetic symbols. Initially, a mapping function between 41 phonetic symbols and 4 rows of keystrokes is defined. By analyzing the phonetic strings of Chinese characters, we then define the criteria for prefix exclusion and context exclusion of two phonetic symbols. If two phonetic symbols have the property of prefix exclusion or context exclusion, we can map these two symbols to a same keystroke without ambigurity. In our algorithm, the user requires which keystrokes should be useless; that is, the requirement is that these phonetic symbols originally mapped to these keystrokes will be remapped to other keystrokes. Accordingly, we locate the phonetic symbols having the exclusion property with these phonetic symbols that should be remapped. Then, according to the measured exclusion property, the user manually determines to which keystrokes these phonetic symbols should be remapped. The experimental results show that the number of keystrokes can be reduced successfully after our algorithm has been performed.