Word Completion with Latent Semantic Analysis

Current word completion tools rely mostly on statistical or syntactic knowledge. Can using semantic knowledge improve the completion task? We propose a language-independent word completion algorithm which uses latent semantic analysis (LSA) to model the semantic context of the word being typed. We find that a system using this algorithm alone achieves keystroke savings of 56% and a hit rate of 42%. This represents improvements of 6.9% and 17%, respectively, over existing approaches