Demonstrating 1D-Touch: NLP-Assisted Coarse Text Selection via a Semi-Direct Gesture

Existing text selection techniques on touchscreen focus on improving the control for moving the carets. Coarse-grained text selection on word- and phrase- levels have not received much support beyond word-snapping and entity recognition. We introduce 1D-Touch, a novel text selection method that complements the carets-based sub-word selection by facilitating the selection of words and larger semantic units. This method employs a simple vertical slide gesture to expand and contract a selection area from a word. The expansion can be by words or by semantic chunks ranging from sub-phrases to sentences, as implemented in two variants of our technique named WordTouch and ChunkTouch. This approach shifts the concept of text selection, away from defining a range by locating the first and last characters, towards a dynamic process of expanding and contracting a textual entity. While the full paper (expected to appear at the ACM ISS 2023) details the evaluation, this demonstration showcases 1D-Touch with a few applications of coarse-grained text selection, to engage the audience in discussions about its effectiveness and applications, as well as its integration with existing character-level selection techniques. © 2023 Owner/Author.