Sequential Decision-Making for Inline Text Autocomplete
Keywords: text autocomplete, real-world application, user study, sequential decision-making
TL;DR: We study the problem of inline autocomplete in text entry systems via sequential decision-making, and use RL to learn suggestion policies that factor user cognitive burden into the training objective.
Abstract: Autocomplete suggestions are fundamental to modern text entry systems, with applications in domains such as messaging and email composition. Typically, autocomplete suggestions are generated from a language model with a confidence threshold. However, this threshold does not directly take into account the cognitive burden imposed on the user by surfacing suggestions, such as the effort to switch contexts from typing to reading the suggestion, and the time to decide whether to accept the suggestion. In this paper, we study the problem of improving inline autocomplete suggestions in text entry systems via a sequential decision-making formulation, and use reinforcement learning (RL) to learn suggestion policies through repeated interactions with a target user over time. This formulation allows us to factor cognitive burden into the objective of training an autocomplete model, through a reward function based on text entry speed. We acquired theoretical and experimental evidence that, under certain objectives, the sequential decision-making formulation of the autocomplete problem provides a better suggestion policy than myopic single-step reasoning. However, aligning these objectives with real users requires further exploration. In particular, we hypothesize that the objectives under which sequential decision-making can improve autocomplete systems are not tailored solely to text entry speed, but more broadly to metrics such as user satisfaction and convenience.
Submission Number: 3
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