Handheld electronic device and associated method enabling the generation of a proposed character interpretation of a phonetic text input in a text disambiguation environment

A handheld electronic device comprising:

• a processor apparatus comprising a processor and a memory having a plurality of objects stored therein;
• an input apparatus comprising a plurality of input members and being structured to provide input to the processor apparatus;
• an output apparatus structured to receive output signals from the processor apparatus;
• at least some of the input members each having a number of linguistic elements assigned thereto;
• the plurality of objects comprising a plurality of language objects, a plurality of characters, a plurality of words, and a plurality of frequency objects, at least some of the language objects each being associated with a plurality of the characters, each word comprising a number of the characters, at least some of the words each having a frequency object associated therewith, each language object comprising a number of the linguistic elements;
• the memory further having stored therein a number of routines which, when executed on the processor apparatus, cause the handheld electronic device to perform operations comprising:
• detecting an ambiguous text input comprising a number of actuations of a number of input members, at least some of the number of input members each having as the number of linguistic elements assigned thereto a plurality of linguistic elements assigned thereto;
• for each of a plurality of linguistic element permutations of the ambiguous input:
• generating a string of language objects that corresponds with at least an initial portion of the linguistic element permutation, and
• generating a character interpretation string that comprises a number of words comprising characters that correspond with the string of language objects;
• selecting from among the generated character interpretation strings at least one generated character interpretation string having the smallest number of words;
• if a plurality of character interpretation strings are selected as having the smallest number of words then
• determining an attributed frequency value for each of the selected character interpretation strings, and selecting the character interpretation string with greatest attributed frequency;
• and
• outputting, as at least partial output, the selected character interpretation string.