Google Japanese Input Annoucement

December 3, 2009 2:50 AM by Rick Noelle

Google announced and released their own Japanese input method software (often called an IME). This created quite a buzz on Twitter and I personally am pretty excited about it so I decided to translate the announcement into English. I'm not a professional translator (not even close) but tried to be as accurate as possible. I plan to write a separate blog post about why I think this Google announcement is significant. The original article can be found here: http://googlejapan.blogspot.com/2009/12/google_03.html.

Japanese Input The Way You Meant It - Google Japanese Input (Google 日本語入力)
12/03/2009
Posted by
Kudo Taku / Software Engineer
Komatsu Hiroyuki / Software Engineer
Oikawa Takuya / Senior Engineering Manager

Today, Google Japanese Input (beta) was released.

Google Japanese Input, available for Windows (32 bit only) as well as Mac, is a Japanese text input software program (input method). Through a wealth of vocabulary combined with a powerful suggest feature, it supports Japanese input the way you meant it.

Google Japanese Input possesses a powerful vocabulary in a league of its own. From the web mechanically and automatically a dictionary is created recording terms not possible to cover by hand such as modern language, specialty and technical terms, celebrity names, etc. In order to realize high conversion precision, large quantities of data gathered from the web are used to construct a statistical language model and generate a conversion engine. You might call it an input method reflective of the modern day Web (the creation of this dictionary and statistical language model make use of Google's large scale distributed processing system "Map Reduce", comprised of computers scaled in the thousands). Furthermore the powerful suggest feature's massive vocabulary can be accessed entering a small number of input keys.

Google Japanese Input was originally started by Google engineers Kudo and Komatsu during their 20% project time. As many of you know, Google's 20% rule states that 20% of employee working hours can be spent working on personal projects.

At that time, Kudo was in charge of Google's "did you mean" feature. The team was developing a "did you mean" system that was highly accurately correcting a large number of spelling mistakes caused by input method misconversion, convincing them that Google Japanese Input was not only possible, but happening right before their eyes.

At that same time Komatsu, an author of open source Japanese input system software, was working on another team. He had joined Google in hopes of developing input methods and was warming to the idea of using the web's massive amount of data combined with Google's suggest feature to provide an input method only possible at Google.

It was in this way that Kudo and Komatsu started the project. Initially it was just the two of them but gradually others started contributing in various forms as part of their 20% project time. Among them were engineers who had participated in the development of various Japanese input and text processing systems such as Anthy, WinAnthy, scim-skk, skkime, AjaxIME, PRIME and MeCab as well as an engineer who had development experience with Windows TSF and engineers with various operating system development experience. Google Japanese Input is the result of the combined know-how and collaboration of these natural language processing and platform system developers.

Google Japanese Input is still in beta with many features yet to be implemented. You may experience application compatibility issues and misconversions. Many improvements remain to be made. We look forward to your bug reports and feedback.

＜Postscript＞
We had a lot of inquiries so we are adding this postscript.

• Google Japanese Input is not connected to the network. It operates offline.
• The property "Secret Mode" allows you to temporarily turn off suggestions based on auto learning, input history and user dictionaries.
• We are currently working very hard on a Windows 64 bit version.

For more information about Google Japanese Input, please refer to the help center. There is also a help forum available.

9:53 AM

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Labels: Engineering, IME, Japanese Input