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Text entry has never been so important as it is today. This is in large part due to the phenomenal, relatively recent success of mobile computing, text messaging on mobile phones, and the proliferation of small devices like the Blackberry and Palm Pilot. Compared with the recent past, when text entry was primarily through the standard qwerty keyboard, people today use a diverse array of devices with the number and variety of such devices ever increasing.

The variety is not just in the devices, but also in the technologies used: Entry modalities have become more varied and include speech recognition and synthesis, handwriting recognition, and even eye-tracking using image processing on web-cams. Statistical language modeling has advanced greatly in the past ten years and so therein is potential to facilitate and improve text entryincreasingly, the way people communicate.