Enjoying Text Input with Image-Enabled IME

Abstract

Tremendous amount of images are used on modern Web pages, but images are rarely used in everyday communication via e-mail, SMS, SNS, etc., although many communication systems allow the use of images in the message. We believe that images can greatly enhance the quality of communication if they are appropriately used with alphabetical texts, and we created a text input system with which users can handle images on HTML editors and word processors just like they can handle words in East-Asian languages. In this paper, we show how images are useful in everyday communication, and show how we can handle images with existing popular dictionary-based text input systems for East-Asian languages. Images are not only useful for rich communication, but they are fun to use and useful for conveying emotions.