Presage 0.8.8

Presage is an intelligent predictive text entry platform. Presage exploits redundant information embedded in natural languages to generate predictions. Presage's modular and pluggable architecture allows its language model to be extended and customized to utilize statistical, syntactic, and semantic information sources.

A predictive text entry system attempts to improve ease and speed of textual input. Word prediction consists in computing which word tokens or word completions are most likely to be entered next. The system analyses the text already entered and combines the information thus extracted with other information sources to calculate a set of most probable tokens.

The set of most probable tokens, a list of suggestions, is displayed to the user. If the token the user intended to enter is in the list, the user selects it and it is automatically entered by the system. If the list of suggestions does not contain the desired word, the user continues entering text until the correct suggestion is offered or until the user is done entering text.

Presage is fundamentally different from predictive input technologies commonly found on mobile phones, which might more accurately be described as 'disambiguating text entry' rather than 'predictive text entry' systems.

Such systems do not try to guess what the user intends to write in the future, only to determine what they most-likely intend to write in the present, given their past input.

Presage, on the other hand, actively predicts the what the user intends to write, and only reverts to word completion mode if the prediction did not contain the desired token.

Presage is free software and it's distributed under the term of the General Public License.


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What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Presage 0.8.8 allows to enabled multiple instances of the same predictor class at runtime through configuration. Each predictor instance is independently configured to allow greater flexibility. Predictive performance can be more finely tailor to the users' specific needs by tuning the resources and configuration of each predictor. The default configuration has been changed to add a custom user smoothed ngram predictor, which adaptively learns its language model. The user-specific default configuration file location is now ~/.presage/presage.xml (~/.presage.xml is no longer used). The configuration now supports and expands environment variables.

· Presage 0.8.8 adds support for filters to dictionary predictor, recency predictor, abbreviation expansion predictor, and dejavu predictor. The smoothed n-gram predictor will create and initialize a language model database if it does not already exist. Learning performance of the smoothed n-gram predictor has been improved. A new configuration variable has been added to control context tracking case sensitivity.