CHIME: An Efficient Error-Tolerant Chinese Pinyin Input Method

Chinese Pinyin input methods are very important for Chinese language processing. In many cases, users may make typing errors. For example, a user wants to type in "shenme" (什么, meaning "what" in English) but may type in "shenem" instead. Existing Pinyin input methods fail in converting such a Pinyin sequence with errors to the right Chinese words. To solve this problem, we developed an efficient error-tolerant Pinyin input method called "CHIME'' that can handle typing errors. By incorporating state-of-the-art techniques and language-specific features, the method achieves a better performance than state-of-the-art input methods. It can efficiently find relevant words in milliseconds for an input Pinyin sequence.