available software: study aid and gist translation system

[trevelyan]

Hi everybody,

As an occasional reader of this forum, I wanted to let people here know about a Perl-based study aid I've been working on in my spare time. I developed it to help read online Chinese text, and extended it during SARS to act as a rudimentary gist-translation system. I've been adding content for a while now, and find that the system works reasonably well in areas where it has a built-up vocabulary (117,000 entries to date, about 10,000 original). The difference between it other projects is the way the software attempts to distinguish between several parts of speech when suggesting definitions.

Since this is a hobby and I'm neither a professional linguist nor computer scientist, I can't make any claims for the accuracy/reliability of the software. There are doubtless faster/better ways to do this, so advice and contributions are more than welcome, especially from any linguists lurking around. I've put a more detailed information and examples of output on my site but thought I'd post a note here in case others might find it useful.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~david/chinese/adso.html

If anyone has any questions, feel free to get in touch.

祝好!

--david

[geek_frappa]

are you a computer scientist?

[trevelyan]

I've studied it, but am not a professional programmer.