Hangul-Lex

Abstract

Most of the electronics handle Korean text entry by implementing automata. Korean characters, Hangul, is an alphabetic syllable writing system that forms a syllable by joining two or more characters into a letter. As the electronics diversify, to satisfy the user, it is important to consider the size and the function of devices when developing the text entry interfaces. However, as the input keys of the text entry methods reduce, the state complexity of the automata increases. Therefore, due to this complexity, developing the automata covering all Hangul syllables become difficult. Additionally, whenever there is a change in the key configuration of Hangul, new Hangul automata are required. Although there has been a drastic advancement in the IT industry such as development from desktop to notebook, notebook to tablet, tablet to smartphone, and smartphone to wearable devices, Hangul key configuration has not changed substantially. Most of the devices continue to use QWERTY, which uses 33 keys to type Hangul. Representing and typing 33 keys in small devices is an ongoing challenge. Thus, to overcome this challenge and to increase the typing usability of the devices, many types of research are actively being done on the keyboard layout. In this research, we present a generator that automatically produces automata for Korean Characters. We developed Lexical Analyzer Generator (Lex) for Korean characters, which is called Hangul-Lex. The Hangul-Lex enables the programmers to create any form of the key structure of the Korean text entry. This reduces the complexity of coding the automata for the Korean characters for programmers since it only requires the use of regular expressions of Korean characters to generate the automata. As a result, Hangul-Lex supports the further development of various key formation of Korean characters.