Transliteration Based Text Input Methods for Telugu

Abstract. Telugu is the third most spoken language in India and one of the fif-teen most spoken languages in the world. But, there is no standardized input method for Telugu, which has a widespread use. Since majority of users of Te-lugu typing tools on the computers are familiar with English, we propose a transliteration based text input method in which the users type Telugu using Roman script. We have shown that simple edit-distance based approach can give a light-weight system with good efficiency for a text input method. We have tested the approach with three datasets – general data, countries and places and person names. The approach has worked considerably well for all the datasets and holds promise as an efficient text input method