Putting Language into Context Using Smartphone-Based Keyboard Logging

While the study of language as typed on smartphones offers valuable insights, existing data collection methods often fall short in providing contextual information and ensuring user privacy. We present a privacy-respectful approach - context-enriched keyboard logging - that allows for the extraction of contextual information on the user's input motive, which is meaningful for linguistics, psychology, and behavioral sciences. In particular, with our approach, we enable distinguishing language contents by their channel (i.e., comments, messaging, search inputs). Filtering by channel allows for better pre-selection of data, which is in the interest of researchers and improves users' privacy. We demonstrate our approach on a large-scale six-month user study (N=624) of language use in smartphone interactions in the wild. Finally, we highlight the implications for research on language use in human-computer interaction and interdisciplinary contexts.