TUIT: A TOOLKIT FOR CONSTRUCTING MULTILINGUAL TIPSTER USER 
INTERFACES 
William C. Ogden 
The Computing Research Laboratory 
New Mexico State University 
ogden@crl.nmsu.edu 
1.0 Introduction 
The TIPSTER Architecture has been designed to 
enable a variety of different text applications to use a set 
of common text processing modules. Since user inter- 
faces work best when customized for particular applica- 
tions, it is appropriator that no particular user interface 
styles or conventions are described in the TIPSTER 
Architecture specification. However, the Computing 
Research Laboratory (CRL) has constructed several 
TIPSTER applications that use a common set of config- 
urable Graphical User Interface (GUI) functions. These 
GUIs were constructed using CRL's TIPSTER User 
Interface Toolkit (TUIT). TUIT is a software library 
that can be used to construct multilingual TIPSTER user 
interfaces for a set of common user tasks. CRL devel- 
oped TUIT to support their work to integrate TIPSTER 
modules for the 6 and 12 month TIPSTER II demonstra- 
tions as well as their Oleada and Temple demonstration 
projects. This paper briefly describes TUIT and its 
capabilities. 
2.0 Document Editing and Browsing 
The TUIT Application Programming Interface 
(API) and software library supports document editing 
and browsing. The TUIT Editor (TED) is a GUI that 
can be used to view and edit multilingual texts. TED 
takes advantage of the Computing Research Labora- 
tory's X-multi-attributed-text (Xmat) widget. The GUI 
is unique in that it provides methods for input, edit, and 
display of text in multiple languages. TED is being used 
in several government sponsored projects at CRL, and is 
User Application 
appropriate for other projects that require multilingual 
text display and edit capabilities. Before TUIT, TIP- 
STER applications that needed multilingual text display 
and edit capabilities required developers to use the 
Motif API and Xmat API, and write all TIPSTER docu- 
ment browsing functions using the Motif and Xmat 
libraries. Ease of incorporating and configuring new 
applications improve significantly with the TUIT 
library with its own API as shown in Figure 1. Applica- 
tions are able to call Xmat library functions on the cre- 
ated widgets as well. 
The TUIT API supports the creation of windows, 
menus, and dialogs. This functionality includes: 
• Dialogs for loading TIPSTER collection documents 
• Creating and configuring document display and edit 
windows 
• Configuring/adding function menus to browser win- 
dows 
• Dialogs for search and replace, spell check, or other 
user defined procedures 
• Dialogs for TIPSTER Extraction modules 
• Language Input method selection 
• Language and code set selection 
• Font selection 
• Print multilingual documents 
• Import/Export Unix files 
An application can include all of this functionality 
with a single TUIT API function call. A document 
TUIT Library 
Xmat Library 
Motif Library 
X Windows 
TIPSTER 
Library 
FIGURE 1. TUIT Library Integrates XWindows with TIPSTER Documents 
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, iii 
FIGURE 2. A typical document browser window showing annotation highlights (proper names) 
browser window such as that shown in Figure 2 would 
be created with this single function call. 
3.0 Attribute and Annotation support 
In applications that incorporate a TIPSTER compli- 
ant document manager, the TUIT API also supports 
TIPSTER document attribute and annotation browsing 
and editing 
Annotation and attribute browsing and editing 
allows users to show, create, or delete document 
attributes, annotations and annotation attributes. There 
are also interfaces for grouping annotations by type or 
attribute values and for hiding or showing these annota- 
tions groups. Annotated text can be displayed with color 
highlighting, or with different font styles. Users can also 
create their own text annotations to be stored with docu- 
ments. 
4.0 Document Manager GUI 
Another TUIT API function creates window, dia- 
logs and menus for managing TIPSTER collections and 
documents. It provides an interface that enables users to: 
• Read/Save documents to TIPSTER Document Col- 
lections 
• Create/Delete documents 
• Rename collection documents 
• Edit document attributes 
• Launch a new TU1T editor with a document 
• Create/Delete collections 
• Add Unix files to collection based on a path and 
wildcard 
• Edit collection attributes 
• Copy and move documents between and among col- 
lections Document 
5.0 Extraction and Detection Support 
TIPSTER compliant extraction modules can be eas- 
ily integrated with the TUIT GUI. For example Japa- 
nese/Chinese interactive segmentation of documents is 
possible in the current system using CRL's Chinese seg- 
mentation system and a TIPSTER front end to JUMAN. 
The segmentation is preserved as document annotations. 
6.0 Configuration support 
TUIT is configurable at run time on a number of 
dimensions through a standard configuration format 
using TCL-style syntax. 
7.0 Status 
TUIT has been fully tested in the Oleada and Tem- 
ple demonstration projects for SunOS 4.x and 5.x 
(Solaris). Contact the author for availability or more 
information. 
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