Shanqing Cai
Shanqing Cai is a Staff Software Engineer at Google. His current research areas include machine learning, large language models (LLMs), human-computer interfaces for text-entry, and accessibility.
Authored Publications
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SkipWriter: LLM-Powered Abbreviated Writing on Tablets
Zheer Xu
Mukund Varma T
Proceedings of UIST 2024 (2024)
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Large Language Models (LLMs) may offer transformative opportunities for text input, especially for physically demanding modalities like handwriting. We studied a form of abbreviated handwriting by designing, developing and evaluating a prototype, named SkipWriter, that convert handwritten strokes of a variable-length, prefix- based abbreviation (e.g., “ho a y” as handwritten strokes) into the intended full phrase (e.g., “how are you” in the digital format) based
on preceding context. SkipWriter consists of an in-production hand-writing recognizer and a LLM fine-tuned on this skip-writing task. With flexible pen input, SkipWriter allows the user to add and revise prefix strokes when predictions don’t match the user’s intent. An user evaluation demonstrated a 60% reduction in motor movements with an average speed of 25.78 WPM. We also showed that this reduction is close to the ceiling of our model in an offline simulation.
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Using large language models to accelerate communication for eye gaze typing users with ALS
Subhashini Venugopalan
Katie Seaver
Xiang Xiao
Sri Jalasutram
Ajit Narayanan
Bob MacDonald
Emily Kornman
Daniel Vance
Blair Casey
Steve Gleason
(2024)
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Accelerating text input in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is a long-standing area of research with bearings on the quality of life in individuals with profound motor impairments. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) pose opportunities for re-thinking strategies for enhanced text entry in AAC. In this paper, we present SpeakFaster, consisting of an LLM-powered user interface for text entry in a highly-abbreviated form, saving 57% more motor actions than traditional predictive keyboards in offline simulation. A pilot study on a mobile device with 19 non-AAC participants demonstrated motor savings in line with simulation and relatively small changes in typing speed. Lab and field testing on two eye-gaze AAC users with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis demonstrated text-entry rates 29–60% above baselines, due to significant saving of expensive keystrokes based on LLM predictions. These findings form a foundation for further exploration of LLM-assisted text entry in AAC and other user interfaces.
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Can Capacitive Touch Images Enhance Mobile Keyboard Decoding?
Billy Dou
Cedric Ho
Proceedings of UIST 2024 (2024)
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Capacitive touch sensors capture the two-dimensional spatial profile (referred to as a touch heatmap) of a finger's contact with a mobile touchscreen. However, the research and design of touchscreen mobile keyboards - one of the most speed- and accuracy-demanding touch interfaces - has focused on the location of the touch centroid derived from the touch image heatmap as the input, discarding the rest of the raw spatial signals. In this paper, we investigate whether touch heatmaps can be leveraged to further improve the tap decoding accuracy for mobile touchscreen keyboards. Specifically, we compared machine-learning models that decode user taps by using the centroids and/or the heatmaps as their input and studied the contribution due to the heatmap. The results show that adding the heatmap into the input feature set led to 21.4% relative reduction of character error rates on average, compared to using the centroid alone. Furthermore, we conducted online deployment testing of the heatmap-based decoder in a user study with 16 participants and observed lower error rate, faster typing speed, and higher self-reported satisfaction score based on the heatmap-based decoder than the centroid-based decoder. These findings underline the promise of utilizing touch heatmaps for improving typing experience in mobile keyboards.
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Rambler: Supporting Writing With Speech via LLM-Assisted Gist Manipulation
Susan Lin
Jeremy Warner
J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira
Matthew G Lee
Sauhard Jain
Michael Xuelin Huang
Bjoern Hartmann
Can Liu
Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA
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Dictation enables efficient text input on mobile devices. However, writing with speech can produce disfluent, wordy, and incoherent text and thus requires heavy post-processing. This paper presents Rambler, an LLM-powered graphical user interface that supports gist-level manipulation of dictated text with two main sets of functions: gist extraction and macro revision. Gist extraction generates keywords and summaries as anchors to support the review and interaction with spoken text. LLM-assisted macro revisions allow users to respeak, split, merge, and transform dictated text without specifying precise editing locations. Together they pave the way for interactive dictation and revision that help close gaps between spontaneously spoken words and well-structured writing. In a comparative study with 12 participants performing verbal composition tasks, Rambler outperformed the baseline of a speech-to-text editor + ChatGPT, as it better facilitates iterative revisions with enhanced user control over the content while supporting surprisingly diverse user strategies.
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SpeakFaster Observer: Long-Term Instrumentation of Eye-Gaze Typing for Measuring AAC Communication
Richard Jonathan Noel Cave
Bob MacDonald
Jon Campbell
Blair Casey
Emily Kornman
Daniel Vance
Jay Beavers
CHI23 Case Studies of HCI in Practice (2023) (to appear)
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Accelerating communication for users with severe motor and speech impairments, in particular for eye-gaze Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) device users, is a long-standing area of research. However, observation of such users' communication over extended durations has been limited. This case study presents the real-world experience of developing and field-testing a tool for observing and curating the gaze typing-based communication of a consented eye-gaze AAC user with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) from the perspective of researchers at the intersection of HCI and artificial intelligence (AI). With the intent to observe and accelerate eye-gaze typed communication, we designed a tool and a protocol called the SpeakFaster Observer to measure everyday conversational text entry by the consenting gaze-typing user, as well as several consenting conversation partners of the AAC user. We detail the design of the Observer software and data curation protocol, along with considerations for privacy protection. The deployment of the data protocol from November 2021 to April 2022 yielded a rich dataset of gaze-based AAC text entry in everyday context, consisting of 130+ hours of gaze keypresses and 5.5k+ curated speech utterances from the AAC user and the conversation partners. We present the key statistics of the data, including the speed (8.1±3.9 words per minute) and keypress saving rate (-0.18±0.87) of gaze typing, patterns of of utterance repetition and reuse, as well as the temporal dynamics of conversation turn-taking in gaze-based communication. We share our findings and also open source our data collections tools for furthering research in this domain.
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Context-Aware Abbreviation Expansion Using Large Language Models
Ajit Narayanan
Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2022 (2022) (to appear)
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Motivated by the need for accelerating text entry in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) for people with severe motor impairments, we propose a paradigm in which phrases are abbreviated aggressively as primarily word-initial letters. Our approach is to expand the abbreviations into full-phrase options by leveraging conversation context with the power of pretrained large language models (LLMs). Through zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning experiments on four public conversation datasets, we show that for replies to the initial turn of a dialog, an LLM with 64B parameters is able to exactly expand over 70% of phrases with abbreviation length up to 10, leading to an effective keystroke saving rate of up to about 77% on these exact expansions. Including a small amount of context in the form of a single conversation turn more than doubles abbreviation expansion accuracies compared to having no context, an effect that is more pronounced for longer phrases. Additionally, the robustness of models against typo noise can be enhanced through fine-tuning on noisy data.
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A Voice-Activated Switch for Persons with Motor and Speech Impairments: Isolated-Vowel Spotting Using Neural Networks
Lisie Lillianfeld
Katie Seaver
Jordan R. Green
InterSpeech 2021 (2021)
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Severe speech impairments limit the precision and range of producible speech sounds. As a result, generic automatic speech recognition (ASR) and keyword spotting (KWS) systems are unable to accurately recognize the utterances produced by individuals with severe speech impairments. This paper describes an approach in which simple speech sounds, namely isolated open vowels (e.g., /a/), are used in lieu of more motorically-demanding keywords. A neural network (NN) is trained to detect these isolated open vowels uttered by individuals with speech impairments against background noise. The NN is trained with a two-phase approach. The pre-training phase uses samples from unimpaired speakers along with samples of background noises and unrelated speech; then the fine-tuning stage uses samples of vowel samples collected from individuals with speech impairments. This model can be built into an experimental mobile app that allows users to activate preconfigured actions such as alerting caregivers. Preliminary user testing indicates the model has the potential to be a useful and flexible emergency communication channel for motor- and speech-impaired individuals.
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TensorFlow.js: Machine Learning for the Web and Beyond
Daniel Smilkov
Nikhil Thorat
Yannick Assogba
Ann Yuan
Nick Kreeger
Ping Yu
Kangyi Zhang
Eric Nielsen
Stan Bileschi
Charles Nicholson
Sandeep N. Gupta
Sarah Sirajuddin
Rajat Monga
SysML, Palo Alto, CA, USA (2019)
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TensorFlow.js is a library for building and executing machine learning algorithms in JavaScript. TensorFlow.js models run in a web browser and in the Node.js environment. The library is part of the TensorFlow ecosystem, providing a set of APIs that are compatible with those in Python, allowing models to be ported between the Python and JavaScript ecosystems. TensorFlow.js has empowered a new set of developers from the extensive JavaScript community to build and deploy machine learning models and enabled new classes of on-device computation. This paper describes the design, API, and implementation of TensorFlow.js, and highlights some of the impactful use cases.
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Creating reliable, production-level machine learning systems brings on a host of concerns not found in small toy examples or even large offline research experiments. Testing and monitoring are key considerations for ensuring the production-readiness of an ML system, and for reducing technical debt of ML systems. But it can be difficult to formulate specific tests, given that the actual prediction behavior of any given model is difficult to specify a priori. In this paper, we present 28 specific tests and monitoring needs, drawn from experience with a wide range of production ML systems to help quantify these issues and present an easy to follow road-map to improve production readiness and pay down ML technical debt.
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TensorFlow Debugger: Debugging Dataflow Graphs for Machine Learning
Eric Nielsen
Michael Salib
Proceedings of the Reliable Machine Learning in the Wild - NIPS 2016 Workshop (2016)
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Debuggability is important in the development of machine-learning (ML) systems.
Several widely-used ML libraries, such as TensorFlow and Theano, are based on
dataflow graphs. While offering important benefits such as facilitating distributed
training, the dataflow graph paradigm makes the debugging of model issues more
challenging compared to debugging in the more conventional procedural paradigm.
In this paper, we present the design of the TensorFlow Debugger (tfdbg), a specialized
debugger for ML models written in TensorFlow. tfdbg provides features
to inspect runtime dataflow graphs and the state of the intermediate graph elements
("tensors"), as well as simulating stepping on the graph. We will discuss the
application of this debugger in development and testing use cases.
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