Practical Challenges for Investigating Abbreviation Strategies

Saying more while typing less is the ideal we strive towards when designing assistive writing technology that can minimize effort. Complementary to efforts on predictive completions is the idea to use a drastically abbreviated version of an intended message, which can then be reconstructed using Language Models. This paper highlights the challenges that arise from investigating what makes an abbreviation scheme promising for a potential application. We hope that this can provide a guide for designing studies which consequently allow for fundamental insights on efficient and goal driven abbreviation strategies.