When I first tried a Swype keyboard I was impressed how effective it was. Even though I don't use the feature on my phone I was interested in how it could be built, so I implemented this otherwise useless swipe-able keyboard below. It probably doesn't work on mobile devices, but works on modern browsers with mouse pointers (although I've only really tried Chrome and Firefox).
I initially tried to solve this using the technique Peter Norvig famously uses in his spell checker. He takes a sequence of characters and generates a set of word candidates by adding, removing and swapping characters in the original sequence, the generated candidates are removed if they are not found a dictionary. This can work but to be effective too many combinations need to be generated.
If the dictionary is indexed into a trie the number of combinations generated can be reduced significantly by traversing the trie and only generating valid letter combinations. This is a pretty bare implementation of that, it requires:
Basically, if you swipe through all the characters in a word in order, then the word will be found if it is in the index regardless how many characters are swiped in between. It is surprisingly quick and effective.
This implementation uses these 10000 words, I intended to use digital books but never got around to it as these words demonstrate the concept well enough.
This is the first thing I've written in ClojureScript or Clojure, so my code my vary from non-idiomatic to shamblolic. I initially used a zipper to build the trie with immutable data structures, but found the indexing took to long with my zipper implementation so I switched to using native Javascript maps.
I found that core.async library is really awesome, the Google closure library and compiler integration with Leiningen the cljsbuild plug-in to be impressive. My main pains were the slow JVM start-up time, the advanced closure compiler build of the web worker script fails silently when run (but the main script works fine when compiled with the advanced compiler), and at times I felt some compile time type checking would be nice.
I would like to extend this experiment to index the word occurrence counts and proceeding word counts in original text and rank the found words as most likely. Support casing, umlauts, special characters, spelling correction and compound words in the indexing and lookup. I think a live lookup while swiping would also be possible.
Overall this was fun, turned out OK I think, and was a great learning experience.