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<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <Paper uid="P98-1055"> <Title>A Text Input Front-end Processor as an Information Access Platform</Title> <Section position="3" start_page="337" end_page="337" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 3. English Writing Support Tool &quot;Eibun Meibun Meikingu&quot; </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> By combining the FEP-type information access platform with the stepped-level interactive machine translation method we proposed in Yamabana (1997), we have developed an English writing support tool to help Japanese people write in English on a PC. This tool, named &quot;Eibun Meibun Meikingu ''l, consists of the following three components: 1) an English writing FEP, &quot;Eisaku Pen ''2, which converts Japanese into English, 2) a CD-ROM dictionary consulting tool, &quot;Shoseki Renzu ''3, and 3) a Japanese-to-English bilingual example sentence database, &quot;Reibun Bainda TM. Figure 2 shows the architecture of &quot;Eibun Meibun Meikingu&quot;. This tool is now available as a software package.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> 3.1. English writing FEP &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; has an interactive interface similar to Kana-Kanji conversion FEPs, and initially replaces most of the Japanese vocabulary items with English equivalents but maintains Japanese grammatical constructions. When a user inputs Japanese text, a conversion window of &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; is automatically popped-up and English equivalents are displayed in the order of original Japanese words. Figure 3 illustrates how text is respectively, 'written materials' and 'a lens'*</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="4" start_page="337" end_page="339" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 4 The Japanese terms Reibun and Bainda mean, </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> respectively, 'example sentences' and 'a binder'.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> Support Tool &quot;Eibun Meibun Meikingu&quot; displayed. When a user inputs Japanese sentence &quot;purezento wo arigato&quot;, where each word means 'present', objective marker and 'thank you' respectively, &quot;purezento &quot; and &quot;arigato&quot; are replaced with their English equivalents 'present' and 'thank you' and displayed automatically in the conversion window shown in the center of the 11 appreciate I~] I Figure 3 Illustration of &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; figure. The window below is an alternatives window to display all the possible equivalents for &quot;arigato&quot;, by selecting from which, users can easily change equivalents. In this alternatives window, &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; provides part-of-speech of each alternative equivalents and supplementary information indicating the difference between their meanings or usage in order to make users' equivalent selection easier.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> After confirming the equivalents of input words, users can execute the Japanese-to-English conversion function, which transforms Japanese grammatical constructions into those of English and the whole sentence is converted to an English sentence: 'Thank you for a present.' by automatic word reordering and article insertion. This syntactic transformation proceeds step by step, in a bottom-up manner, combining smaller translation components into larger ones. Such a 'dictionary-based interactive translation' approach allows users to refine dictionary suggestions at different steps of the process. Finally, users can also easily change articles to obtain the result sentence: 'Thank you for the present.' The system dictionary of &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; contains about 100,000 Japanese vocabulary entries and 15,000 idiomatic expressions. Since there was no source available to build an idiom dictionary of this size, we collected them manually, from scratch, following a method described in Tamura (1997).</Paragraph> <Section position="1" start_page="338" end_page="338" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 3.2. CD-ROM dictionary consulting tool &quot;Shoseki Renzu&quot; </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> While using &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot;, if users want to obtain more information on words or equivalents, &quot;Shoseki Renzu&quot; provides a function to consult CD-ROM dictionaries.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> For example, when users execute the CD-ROM dictionary consulting function of &quot;Shoseki Renzu&quot; at the situation of the Figure 3, the currently selected alternative 'thank you' is regarded as a key word for dictionary consulting and the contents of the dictionaries for 'thank you' is displayed. If users double-click on another word in a conversion window or an alternatives window including the original Japanese word shown at the top of the window, the word is regarded as a key word for dictionary consulting.</Paragraph> </Section> <Section position="2" start_page="338" end_page="339" type="sub_section"> <SectionTitle> 3.3. Bilingual example sentence database &quot;Reibun Bainda&quot; </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> &quot;Eibun Meibun Meikingu&quot; also provides a function to retrieve and utilize bilingual example sentences. Example sentences relevant to the texts input by users are retrieved from the database of &quot;Reibun Bainda&quot; containing 3,000 of Japanese-to-English bilingual sentence pairs for letter writing. Figure 4 illustrates the Japanese-to-English sentence pairs retrieved when a user Japanese word &quot;arigato&quot; is regarded as a key word for retrieving and the example sentences which are assigned a key word &quot;arigato&quot; beforehand or include strings of &quot;arigato&quot; in the Japanese sentence are retrieved from the bilingual example sentence database of &quot;Reibun Bainda&quot; and displayed in the window as illustrated in Figure 4. Japanese sentences are shown in the first column and translated English sentences are shown in the second one. The third one is for supplementary information indicating the difference between meanings or usage of the sentences. Users can easily send these sentences to text-input applications by drag-and-drop operation using a mouse. In addition, by using &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot;, users easily edit a Japanese word and its English equivalents in example sentences synchronously.</Paragraph> </Section> </Section> <Section position="5" start_page="339" end_page="339" type="metho"> <SectionTitle> 4. Information Access Function of English Writing Support Tool </SectionTitle> <Paragraph position="0"> Our tool currently accesses three types of information: 1) information, included in the system dictionary, regarding grammatical forms and idiomatic expressions; 2) straight CD-ROM dictionary information; and 3) Japanese-to-English example sentences in the database. The extent to which the retrieval and display of information proceeds automatically depends on the type of information being referenced; information of type 1) is retrieved and displayed automatically, that of type 2) is both retrieved and displayed manually, and that of type 3) is retrieved automatically but displayed manually.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="1"> In the first case of translation equivalents and grammatical information retrieval, &quot;Eisaku Pen&quot; automatically retrieves and displays English words equivalent to the input Japanese texts without explicit user command because users always utilize the English equivalents in English writing.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="2"> In the second case of CD-ROM dictionary consulting, &quot;Shoseki Renzu&quot; retrieves and displays contents of CD-ROM dictionaries on user command because this dictionary consulting function needs to be executed only when users require additional information. Our tool requires much less user action than other dictionary consulting tools because key words are automatically extracted before user command for retrieval and users don't always need to input key words.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="3"> In the third case of bilingual sentence retrieval, &quot;Reibun Bainda'&quot; retrieves sentences automatically but displays only on user command. Because &quot;Reibun Bainda&quot; contains the example sentences in itself, relevant sentences are retrieved at high speed and the retrieval function doesn't interrupt users' writing process.</Paragraph> <Paragraph position="4"> Retrieved sentences, however, might include the ones not relevant to the input text from users' point of view, because similarity between sentences is judged with a simple method using key words. Therefore, the writing process might be interrupted if retrieved sentences were displayed automatically. To avoid this problem, the color of the icon of &quot;Reibun Bainda&quot; is changed after automatic retrieval, depending on the existence of relevant sentences, and users can decide whether to display the retrieved sentences.</Paragraph> </Section> class="xml-element"></Paper>