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Title Evaluation of Virtual Keyboards for West-African Languages
Full text http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/40/94/31/PDF/LREC2008_Enguehard_Naroua.pdf
Date 2008
Author(s) Enguehard, Chantal; Naroua, Harouna
Abstract West African languages are written with alphabets that comprize non classical Latin characters. It is possible to design virtual keyboards which allow the writing of such special characters with a combination of keys. During the last decade, many different virtual keyboards had been created, without any standardization to fix the correspondence between each character and the keys to press to obtain it. We define a grid to evaluate such keyboards and apply it to five virtual keyboards in relation with the five main languages of Niger (Fulfulde, Hausa, Kanuri, Songhai-Zarma, Tamashek), Bambara and Soninke from Mali and Dyoula from Burkina Faso. We conclude that the African LLACAN keyboard should be recommended in Niger because it covers all the characters used in the alphabets of the main languages of this country, it produces valid Unicode codes and it minimizes the number of keys to be pressed.
Subject(s) [INFO:INFO_TT] Computer Science/Document and Text Processing; Natural Language Processing; keyboard layout; Under-Ressourced Language; Endangered Langage; West-African languages
Coverage Marrakech
Language EN
Publisher HAL - CCSD
Type of publication text
Identifier HAL:hal-00409431, version 1; HAL:http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00409431/en/
Repository France - Hyper Article en Ligne (HAL)
Added to C-A: 2009-12-16;15:01:11