[Sugar-devel] Dictionary everywhere ?

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hello,

Based on comments raised in this thread and during yesterday's design
meeting, I have made some changes: video at
http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/global_dictionary_second_try.ogv
In case of multiple selections, the words are no longer in the form of
a set of hyperlinks, one can choose the dictionary from which the
definition is to be retrieved and also the definition is made a bit
more pleasing to the eye (with some really ugly hacks) :)

There were some more interesting ideas yesterday, especially
Christian's ideas on providing machine-translation for
sentences/phrases. However, I tried out Apertium, and somehow did not
like the results. We can probably query Google's translation engine,
but that would be a proprietary backend and also would require
internet access.

Some issues that need to be addressed:

1) Hyperlinking inside the definitions and providing a back button
(for "See also:" kind of terms). This simply needs some more coding,
and some ideas on where to put the back button.

2) Stemming. Some words (eg: hurried) are not in the dictionary. In
such a case, do we perform some kind of stemming on the word ? This
does make things more complicated, but it would let us provide more
definitions.

3) Language detection. I stated in one of the previous mails in this
thread that this would be difficult, but a friend of mine has been
working in this area (http://smc.org.in/silpa/Guess_Language), and he
has achieved some really good results already. If required, we can
reuse his work.

Thanks,
Sayamindu


On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 5:40 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I was wondering about having a global "dictionary" key in sugar, just
> like the view source key. When you select a word (or words), and press
> that key, a window should pop up, showing the meaning of that word (or
> those words). There can be a control panel entry to choose what
> dictionary to use (eg: someone might want to have a English-Spanish
> dictionary instead of a English-English one, etc).
> I did a bit of hacking last weekend to come up with a rough mockup for
> the feature.
> There's a screencast at
> http://people.sugarlabs.org/sayamindu/global_dictionary.ogv
> (it works with all activities, and not just with Browse - and the
> window pops up when I press the key)
> Does it make sense for Sugar ? If it does, I think I can beat it into
> shape over the next few weekends.
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu
>
>
> --
> Sayamindu Dasgupta
> [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]
>



-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]