Smart Chinese Reader 2.0

[yifeng]

Smart Chinese Reader 2.0 is now released. It has some interesting features that distinguish it from other Chinese reading/learning softwares:

• Multiple reading views - Suitable for users at different Chinese levels.

• Higher precision of Chinese word segmentation - Parse a sentence as a whole, chooses the one which has the largest global probability from huge amounts of segmentation options.

• Color part of speech notation - Label parts of speech with different colors as "verb", "adjective", "adverb", "noun", or "place name", "person name". Useful for developing a clearer understanding of Chinese grammar. 

• Full text pronunciation - Pronounce a whole sentence in your choice of Chinese voices. 

• Example sentence lookup - Given a Chinese word, offer Chinese-English sentence pairs, in which the Chinese sentence is original and contains the specified word, the English sentence is its translation by human translator. 

• Full text translation - Translate a whole sentence into English.

• HSK assistant - Help you prepare for HSK exam in two ways. First, indicate HSK words in the text you are reading; Second, mark your known words in the vocabulary of each HSK level to measure your literacy. 

• Traditional Chinese character support - The simplified equivalent is displayed following each traditional Chinese character.

 

Some interfaces are attached below. For details about Smart Chinese Reader 2.0, please visit our site http://www.nlptool.com/ We welcome your feedback on this product. We would love to hear your comments or criticisms about any aspect of this software. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[大块头]

1. What is the "109,614 entry dictionary" that comes with this software?

Have you tested this software on Windows 10 at all?

I see that you can mark a word as "known" in the software. Can I upload a .csv file with a list of known words from my Anki deck?

[yifeng]

Thank you very much for browsing our website. 

 

1.What is the "109,614 entry dictionary" that comes with this software?

The dictionary we use in the popup tooltip is CC-CEDICT from MDBG, which we have declared in the page http://www.nlptool.com/interface.html on our website.

 

We used a Chinese-English bilingual corpus with 5 million sentence pairs to train our translation model (the core of the phrase-based statistical machine translation technology). The corpus is also used in example sentence search and thus incorporated in Smart Chinese Reader, that is why our software is big in size (250MB). When you double-click a word in a text, example sentences are retrieved from this corpus instantly.

 

2.Have you tested this software on Windows 10 at all?

Yes, we have tested Smart Chinese Reader 2.0 on Windows 10. Among computers we have tested on, it ran smoothly.

 

3.I see that you can mark a word as "known" in the software. Can I upload a .csv file with a list of known words from my Anki deck?

Smart Chinese Reader's known word list is stored in the file "known.txt", which is located in the folder "My Documents/Smart Chinese Reader" on your computer. It is a UTF-8 file with one word per line. We will add the feature of importing .csv file in the next version. As a temporary solution, we will develop a small tool to convert .csv to a one-word-per-line file, and put it on our website as soon as possible. Now you can email your .csv file to me yifeng_yu@nlptool.com, let me convert it for you.

[querido]

The segmentation and translation algorithms do seem superior, just as described on the website.

 

I see that it can use a Cantonese voice. Very good.

 

Just one more thing: I have made Chinese Text Analyser use a Cantonese dictionary just by swapping a text file (as I explained elsewhere). Can I do the same with Smart Chinese Reader 2.0??

 

Edit: To students of Cantonese: I guess a lot of the other functions like grammar and phrase analysis won't work right for a student of Cantonese (if the text is "written spoken Cantonese"). However, "Written Standard Chinese with Cantonese pronunciation" could still be studied, if it can accept the dictionary.

[yifeng]

Thank you very much for your interest in Smart Chinese Reader. Our software uses data produced from a large Chinese corpus (Sentences are segmented and labeled with parts of speech by human) to segment and parse text. And data produced from a huge Chinese-English parallel corpus are used for translation and example sentence search. These mass data have  sophisticated structures and can't be replaced.

 

Dictionary displayed in the popup window is relatively simple. It is CC-CEDICT from MDBG and has a straight-forward stucture, i.e. one word (headword + pinyin + definition ) per line. But it has been indexed and compiled into several binary files to get faster access speed. So you can't replace it too. 

 

Now we know the requirements of students of Cantonese. We decide to supplement our popup dictionary with Penkyampji (Cantonese pinyin) in the future versions, just as we have added the HSK level indicator in the current version. In conjunction with the available full-text pronunciation in a Cantonese voice, it will let users learn Cantonese more easily.

[LaoDing]

When will you port it to Mac? I'd like to try it too.

[yifeng]

I am very glad that you are interested in Smart Chinese Reader. Because I have more innovative ideas to implement, the Windows version is still being perfected. For example, version 2.1 with a to-learn word list and a Review tab added is under the final test and will be released in a week. The task needs one or two years. So migration to Mac may not be so soon.

 

My suggestion is that you run a virtual machine program (Parallels, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox) that runs Windows in a window in OS X. Or, run Windows in Apple's BootCamp, which partitions the boot drive and you install Windows in there. Then try the Windows version of Smart Chinese Reader. A troublesome thing to do indeed. 

[yifeng]

Hi, everyone! We have improved Smart Chinese Reader and release a new version. Smart Chinese Reader 2.1 has two new features: to-learn word list and Review tab. Joined together, they provide a good way to review words. When you encounter a word that is difficult to remember and you need to restudy it later, mark it as 'to-learn'. Its occurrences will be highlighted with red border in the Advanced view and the HSK view (called Known view in version 2.0 ).

 

 

 

And it will also be listed in the new added Review view, where you can improve and test your understanding of this word via doing quizzes on its definition and usages in different contexts. 

 

 

In addition, we have revised the TTS (text-to-speech) code for text pronunciation to make it more robust. Samples of the sentence "第29届奥运会在北京圆满闭幕"  read by Smart Chinese Reader in Microsoft Huihui voice and Lili voice respectively are attached. For details, please visit http://www.nlptool.com/TTS.html

 

tts_Huihui.mp3

tts_LiLi.mp3

 

Users can try this software free for 30 days. If you don't want to pay after expiration, you can continue using it with all features only except example sentence search. 

 

Welcome to try Smart Chinese Reader 2.1 at http://www.nlptool.com/  and give us some comments. Thanks!

[LinZhenPu]

Do you think you could make a browser plugin for this software so that it can be use directly with any website, instead of having to copy and paste and dealing with the issues that comes with that.

[yifeng]

Good question! Smart Chinese Reader initially focused on studying a Chinese text in depth, so not much thought was given to sources of texts.

 

But from user feedback, we now know that users usually first skim a lot of web pages for practical information about travel, food, schools, and job opportunities in China. Then among the pages, they select some texts or paragraphs that are interesting to them and suitable for their Chinese levels, and use Smart Chinese Reader to read these texts/paragraphs in detail to learn more language knowledge such as word usages and sentence patterns. To help them carry out the first task, a plugged-in web browser with a popup Chinese dictionary is necessary. We decide to add such a web browser into Smart Chinese Reader in the next version.

[LinZhenPu]

Oh, well sweet.

[yifeng]

A major update of Smart Chinese Reader is released. Smart Chinese Reader 3.0 brings a significant improvement, it offers a built-in web broswer with a popup Chinese dictionary. Now you can read any Chinese web page easily in the new added Browser tab. Enter its address in the address bar and click the "Go" icon to go to the page. Then, simply hover your mouse over a word to pull up its definition right on the page. 
 

 
Better still, you can select a section in the page and click the "Study" button to bring up the the Beginner and Advanced tabs, where the text is well formatted and easier to read. 
 




Please download and try the new version from our website http://www.nlptool.com

[yifeng]

We have just released Smart Chinese Reader 3.1. Several enhancements have been applied to improve the user experience, two of them are significant:

 

1. Updating the built-in web browser: The popup dictionary on mouseover didn't work properly for some web pages in version 3.0. We have strengthened the program; now you can skim 淘宝(taobao) and any other Chinese web sites quickly.   

 

2. Updating the feature of example sentence search: For most Chinese words, 20 example sentences are provided for you to clarify their usages.

 

Welcome to download and try Smart Chinese Reader 3.1 at http://www.nlptool.com/ We will be grateful if you write a review or share your experience after trial. In return, we will give you a free license. The quota is 10 people.

 

Figure 1. Dictionary pops up while mouse over "孕产" when browsing the Chinese No.1 online mall.

 

Figure 2. Example sentences for "隐蔽" sorted by length. The popup dictionary is also available for example sentences.