1. Sunpinyin and Its Future
Mike(Dai) Qin
mikeandmore@gmail.com
University of Toronto
July 17, 2011

2. Who Am I
• Just call me Mike.
• Used to be a student of Zhejiang University, Hangzhou. Now
admitted by University of Toronto.
• Was born in Tianjin. (That’s why I’m here.)
• Has been using Linux since high school. A Fedora user now.
• Has been a sunpinyin committer since 2009 winter.

3. Pinyin Input Method
• Show several candidates according to Pinyin that user inputs.
• Lots of commercial and free implementation.
• Pinyin ABC
• Microsoft Pinyin
• Sougou Pinyin
• QQ Pinyin

4. Approach
• Dictionary based
• A dictionary that contains all possible words.
• Always look up from the dictionary upon user input.
• Will adjust the order of candidates upon user commit.
• Pros: Easy to implement.
• Cons: Not intelligence enough when words are combined.
• Implementation:
• Pinyin ABC (Commercial)
• Fcitx (GPL)
• ibus-pinyin (GPL)

5. Approach
• N-Gram based
• Have a database of conditional probability.
• Will try to calculate the sentence with the larger probability.
• Interpolate between user commit history and database.
• Pros: Intelligence!
• Cons: Where can I get the database?
• Implementation:
• Sunpinyin (LGPL/CDDL)
• Sougou Pinyin (Commercial)

6. Sunpinyin and OpenGram Project
• Sunpinyin is a input method using N-Gram based method.
• Free as in freedom. LGPL license.
• It’s using tri-grams for build-in and bi-grams for user history.
• OpenGram project aims at creating a tri-gram database for
Simplified Chinese.
• Free as in freedom. CC license.

7. Current Progress - Sunpinyin
• Released 2.0.3, and we’re working on 2.1/2.5 release.
• Works on Linux, BSD and OSX platform, with native
interface.
• Ported to Ibus(ibus-sunpinyin), Scim(scim-sunpinyin). Also
have a standalone version(xsunpinyin).
• Current Progress of next release.
• Multiple Best Sentence. done
• Partial Sentence. done
• Plugin Support. WIP
• Needs maintainer!

8. What Do I Need to Know Before Joining
Sunpinyin?
• Passion.
• A little C++ knowledge. (Nobody in the team know C++
completely. :) )
• That’s enough! and maybe plus
• Ibus/Scim API, Xorg API or OSX API.
• Python API. (Plugin Support)
• Windows API. (Windows Port?)

9. Q&A