Development and theoretical evaluation of optimized phonemic interfaces

© 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). In this paper, optimized communication interfaces in which users select phonemes (sounds) instead of letters or whole words are presented and evaluated. Optimization is based on phoneme transition likelihoods (i.e., the probability of transitioning from one phoneme to another in a particular communication corpus), similar to letter-to-letter transition likelihoods used to optimize orthographic interfaces. However, it is unknown to what extent phoneme transition likelihoods vary by corpus, nor how optimizing based on different corpora affects the final interface efficiency. Here we used computational evaluations to compare phoneme transition likelihoods between various phonemic corpora and optimize phonemic interfaces with each corpus. Each interface's efficiency was evaluated against all the corpora. Phoneme-to-phoneme transitions were highly correlated across corpora (r = 0.7-0.86). Optimization based on phoneme-to-phoneme transition likelihoods improved efficiency by around 20-30% compared to random phonemic layouts, regardless of the corpus used to optimize the interface. Optimizations using different corpora were similar, varying only by 3-5%. We conclude that, if possible, future phonemic interfaces should be optimized via a corpus from the intended user's communication. If this is not possible, however, optimization still improved efficiency using all testing corpora, suggesting that optimizing via any relevant corpus is indicated over other layouts.