6. A text entry system, comprising: (a) a user input device comprising an auto-correcting keyboard region comprising a plurality of the characters of a character set, wherein locations having known coordinates in the auto-correcting keyboard region are associated with corresponding character set members, wherein user interaction with the user input device within the auto-correcting keyboard region determines a location associated with the user interaction and wherein the determined interaction location is added to a current input sequence of contact locations; (b) a memory containing a plurality of objects, wherein each object comprises a string of one or more character set members; (c) an output device with a text display area; and (d) a processor coupled to the user input device, memory, and output device, said processor comprising: (i) a distance value calculation component which, for each determined interaction location in the input sequence of interactions, calculates a set of distance values between the interaction locations and the known coordinate locations corresponding to one or more character set members within the auto-correcting keyboard region; (ii) an object evaluation component which, for a generated input sequence, evaluates at least one candidate object in memory by calculating a matching metric based on the calculated distance values for the object; and ranks the evaluated candidate objects based on the calculated matching metric values; and (iii) a selection component which presents said at least one candidate object to the user according to its ranking, and enables the user to select among presented objects for output to the text display area on the output device.
17. The system of claim 6 , wherein the set of distance values between a predetermined interaction location and the locations of corresponding character set members which are nearer than a threshold minimum distance from said predetermined interaction location is computed in advance.