JPH04174069A - Language understanding assisting device - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To speedily understand a document by consulting with a dictionary immediately when a word whose meaning can not be understood is encountered at the time of understanding the document, and displaying dictionary data nearby the word and storing the data relatively. CONSTITUTION:The document in object language is inputted through an input device 10 and the inputted document and the processing result of a processor 1 are displayed on a display device 6. The words in the document displayed on the display device 6 are indicated by a word indication device and looked up in the dictionary by a dictionary retrieval device 8. Dictionary information on the retrieved words is displayed on the display device 6 and also displayed nearby the words by a display controller 5. The words and desired information are related and stored in a memory 2. Consequently, the document can speedily be understood.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates to a language understanding support device, and more particularly to a language understanding support device that helps in reading a text.

Lately, manuals, scientific and technical literature, and their abstracts have become available in electronic form.

When reading such electronic text on a display screen, whether the text is Japanese or a text written in a foreign language, one often encounters words whose meanings are unclear. In such cases, it would be extremely inefficient to bring an English-Japanese dictionary or a Japanese dictionary to look up the word in question, and the dictionary would have to be looked up many times each time the user needed to refer to it.

On the other hand, the method described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 59-165179 uses a word division function to touch any word of a sentence displayed on the display screen with a light pen. The invention relates to a dictionary lookup method that allows words to be divided and retrieved from a sentence and looked up in a dictionary. However, all that was required was to specify an arbitrary word from a sentence displayed on the display screen with a light pen, extract it, look it up in a dictionary, and list the results.

In addition, the method described in the above-mentioned Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 59-165179 only displays the dictionary information of the specified word in the form of a list, and the information cannot be left behind, so words of unknown meaning cannot be saved. If you have a lot of information or have forgotten it, you have to read it again or write it down in advance, which is not efficient in terms of understanding a single sentence.

Moreover, the present invention was made in view of the above-mentioned circumstances,
To help you understand sentences more efficiently by helping you look up words in a sentence that you don't understand, and by rewriting certain words whose syntax is difficult to understand into other expressions. The purpose of this work is to provide a language understanding support device that allows users to efficiently understand sentences by doing the following.

In order to achieve the above object, the present invention provides (1) an input means for inputting a text, a display means for displaying the text inputted by the input means and a processing result, and a method for displaying the text by the display means. a word indicating means for indicating a word in the given sentence;
a word dictionary storing translation information and usage example information of a plurality of words; a dictionary search means for performing a dictionary lookup of the word designated by the word instruction means; and displaying the dictionary information of the word by the display means. display control means for displaying desired information among the dictionary information in the vicinity of the word;
(2) in (1) above, further comprising: a storage means for storing the word and desired information in association with each other;
The word specifying means includes a character specifying means for specifying a character in a sentence, and a word extracting means for extracting a word including the specified character; and (3) in (2) above, the word The extraction means is equipped with either surface analysis or morphological analysis; and (4) storing the desired data associated with the text in (1) above;
It has been made possible to reload it, and also (
5) In (1) above, the dictionary search means is configured to be able to re-look up words that have already been looked up in the dictionary; and (6) in (1) above, the display in the vicinity is such that the desired information is Further, (7) in (1) above, the display in the vicinity is such that the word and the desired information are connected by a line so that the correspondence relationship between the word and the desired information can be seen. Further, (8) an input means for inputting text, a display means for displaying the text inputted by the input means and a processing result, and a text displayed by the display means; a word indicating means for indicating a certain kind of word in the text; and a syntactic analysis means for identifying a sentence including the word indicated by the word indicating means using a word dictionary and an analysis grammar and performing syntactic analysis processing. , an original document rewriting means for rewriting a word of the original text into another expression based on the result of the analysis process by the syntactic analysis means, and a display control means for displaying the new expression by the original document rewriting means in the vicinity of the previously instructed word. , storage means for storing the word and a new expression in association with each other; and (9) in (8) above, the word designation means includes character designation means for designating a character in a sentence; (10) storing the desired data associated with the sentence in (8) above;
It has been made possible to reload it, and also (
1]) In (8) above, the display in the vicinity is characterized by comprising display control means for controlling the display so that the word and the desired information are connected by a line so that the correspondence relationship between the word and the desired information can be seen. It is. Embodiments of the present invention will be described below.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram for explaining one embodiment of the language understanding support device according to the present invention. In the figure, 1 is a processing device, 2 is a memory, 3 is a document file, 4 is a word dictionary, and 5 is a display. 6 is a display device, 7 is a word extraction device, 8 is a dictionary search device, 9 is a printing device, and 10 is an input device.

The present invention displays a sentence stored in an input device or storage device such as a keyboard or OCR (optical character reader) on a display screen, and when a character in a meaningless word in the sentence is specified, the corresponding character is displayed. Dictionary information for a word is quickly displayed on the screen, and when desired information is selected from among the dictionary information, that information is displayed near the word.

A sentence in the target language is input by the input device 10, and the input sentence and the processing result by the processing device 1 are displayed on the display M.
6 is displayed. Words in the sentence displayed by the display device 6 are indicated by a word indicating device. The word dictionary 4 stores translation information and usage example information for a plurality of words. The word specified by the word specifying device is looked up in a dictionary by a dictionary search device 8. The dictionary information of the word to be searched is displayed on the display device 6, and displayed near the word by the display control device 5. Words and desired information are associated and stored in the memory 2.

The word indicating device includes means for indicating a character in a sentence;
It has a word extraction device 7 that extracts a word containing the designated character.

In FIG. 1, a display device 6 displays text on its screen, and when looking up a dictionary, any character constituting a word to be looked up is clicked with a mouse. Note that although a mouse is used in the embodiment of the present invention, other instruction means such as a light pen or a touch panel can also be used for specifying.

FIG. 3 is a flowchart for explaining the operation of the language understanding support device according to the present invention. Below, each step will be explained in order.

First, English text as shown in FIG. 2(a) is displayed.

Du Wangsu: The operator clicks with the mouse any character that constitutes the word for which he wants to obtain dictionary information.

Extracts the word on the screen that includes the character at the position clicked with the mouse, performs a dictionary search for the word, and displays the obtained dictionary information on the screen. For example, FIG. 2(b) is a diagram showing the state of the screen immediately after searching for dictionary information for 'bowled'. The dictionary also includes verb conjugation information, and the specified word 'bowled' is '
A dictionary lookup is performed using bowl' as a headword.

The dictionary information includes translation data for the word in question along with usage examples.

1SPA221-: After this, the operator clicks with the mouse the first character of the desired translated word from the displayed dictionary information, and then the last character of the translated word.

Write the desired dictionary data to the internal table in memory 2, and first calculate the on-screen coordinates of the column directly below it from the on-screen coordinates of the first character of the specified word. do.

Zenisha Kori: The information on the coordinates is sent to the display control means, and the desired dictionary information is displayed near the word. In the embodiment of the present invention, the translation is written below the word.

When the end key is pressed here, the support device of the present invention stores the obtained dictionary information together with the original text and ends the process.

Figure 2(c) shows that the translated word ``to be seriously surprised'' is ``bo''.
It is written under wl'. The original word is 'bow'
The past participle form is 'led', but the operator is 'led'.
Since it is sufficient to know the translation of bowl', processing such as morpheme generation of the translation is not performed in the embodiment of the present invention.

In this way, the original text and the dictionary information regarding the words looked up in the dictionary are stored in association with each other, so that when the text is read again, the dictionary information that has already been obtained can be viewed at a glance.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart of the process of step 3 in FIG. Below, each step will be explained in order.

5te1314; First, the position clicked with the mouse is recognized, and characters are acquired one after another on each of the left and right sides until there is a blank space, and the word specified by the operator is recognized.

5te1516; Then, the coordinates of the first character of the specified word are stored, and dictionary information is extracted from the English-Japanese dictionary. Further, from among the dictionary information displayed on the screen, the characters selected by the operator as the translation word are written into the internal table in step 58.

FIGS. 5(a) and 5(b) show an embodiment in which the present invention is applied to Japanese text. Assume that the content shown in FIG. 5(a) is displayed on the screen of a display device, and a dictionary search is performed for the word "opaque." When one of the words "fu", "transparent", and "clear J" that make up "opaque" is clicked with the mouse, the breaks (punctuation marks) before and after "fu" are found, and the character string shown in Figure 6 is found. is extracted. In the case of Japanese, morphological analysis is performed with reference to the Japanese morphological analysis dictionary, and the character string is divided into word units as shown by underlines in FIG. The word "opaque J" is sent to the dictionary lookup means, and the Japanese language dictionary is accessed. The retrieved dictionary information is displayed on the screen of the display device as shown in FIG. 5(b). In this case, the operator , the word “
When "unclear" is selected as the meaning of "opaque", the dictionary information is written under the word, as shown in FIG. 5(c).

In the word extraction process according to the present invention, in the case of English, a superficial analysis process is carried out using the feature of separated writing, and in the case of Japanese, a morphological analysis process is carried out. You can also use a range specification method that specifies the first and last characters of the word you want to look up in the dictionary.

In addition, if the word searched in a dictionary is associated with the desired dictionary data and stored in the memory 2, and accessed when performing a dictionary search for a newly specified word, the same word can be retrieved. In this case, all you need to do is retrieve the search results already stored in memory, saving you the trouble of looking up a dictionary.

If the existing search results are inconvenient due to differences in parts of speech, etc., a re-search key can be prepared and pressed to enable the re-search.

In the above embodiment, the desired dictionary information is displayed below the word, but the display is not limited to this, and may be displayed in the vicinity of the word.

Furthermore, when the words to be looked up in a dictionary are adjacent, the dictionary information displayed nearby may be connected, making it difficult to read, as shown in FIG. 7(a).

In order to prevent this, the display control means is used as shown in Fig. 7 (b).
), it is also possible to display the words by connecting them with a line so that the correspondence between the word and its dictionary information can be easily determined.

Furthermore, although the example shown in FIG. 7(,) is a case where the dictionary information is connected, it is possible that the information may overlap if the translated word is long. Even in such a case, the display control means can divide and display the tasks in an easy-to-read manner.

In the above explanation, the dictionary information of the designated word is displayed near the word, and this dictionary information is stored in association with the text so that it can be read again. However, when reading electronic text on a display screen, whether it is Japanese text or text written in a foreign language, it is difficult for people who are not very familiar with the language to understand the meanings of the words. However, it is difficult to understand syntactically. In order to solve this problem, it is preferable to use another embodiment having the following configuration. That is, in this embodiment, a sentence stored in an input device or a storage device such as a keyboard or OCR is displayed on the display screen, and when characters in a certain word in the sentence are specified, the text containing the word is displayed. This system recognizes a sentence, performs syntactic analysis, rewrites the word in another expression, and displays the information near the word.

FIG. 8 is a block diagram for explaining another embodiment of the language understanding support device according to the present invention, in which 21 is a processing device;
2 is a memory, 23 is a document file, 24 is an input device, 2
5 is a display control device, 26 is a display device, 27 is a word extraction device, 28 is a syntax analysis device, 29 is an original document rewriting device, 3
0 is an analysis grammar, 31 is a word dictionary, and 32 is a printing device.

A sentence in the target language is input by the input device 24, and the input sentence and the processing result by the processing device 21 are displayed on the display device. Certain words in the text displayed by the display device 26 are indicated by a word indicating device 26. A sentence including the word indicated by the word indicating device is recognized using the word dictionary 31 and the parsing grammar 30, and a syntactic analysis process is performed by the syntactic analysis device 28.

Based on the result of this analysis process, the original document rewriting device 29
The word in the original text is rewritten into another expression, the rewritten new expression is displayed near the previously instructed word by a display control device 25, and the word and the new expression are associated and stored in a storage device.

In FIG. 8, a display device 26 displays text on its screen, and when looking up a dictionary, any character constituting a word to be looked up is clicked with a mouse. Note that although a mouse is used in the embodiment of the present invention, other instruction means such as a light pen or a touch panel can also be used for specifying.

FIG. 9(a) shows an example of English text displayed. In the embodiment of the present invention, the pronoun "dO" is taken as an example of a word whose meaning is difficult to understand in an English sentence. Words of this type include words in the present participle form that occur in participial constructions, relative pronouns,
There are relative adverbs and the pseudo-subject 'it'.

FIG. 11 is a flowchart for explaining the operation of the language understanding support device in FIG. 8.

Below, each step will be explained in order.

First, English text as shown in FIG. 9(a) is displayed.

Katsura Jamata: Click with the mouse any character that makes up the word that the operator wants to rewrite.

Wanwangling: Check the words on the screen that include the character at the position clicked with the mouse, identify the sentence that contains that word,
Performs syntax analysis processing.

Next, the word is rewritten into another expression based on the dictionary information of the instructed word and stored in the memory.

The rewritten expression for the indicated word is
From the coordinates on the screen of the first character of the specified word that was previously stored, the coordinates on the screen of the column directly below it are calculated, and the coordinate information is sent to the display control means, and the desired expression is Displayed nearby. In an embodiment of the present invention, the expression is written below the word.

If the end key is pressed here, the obtained rewritten expression is stored together with the original text and the process ends.

FIG. 12 is a flowchart of the process of step 2 in FIG. 11. Below, each step will be explained in order.

First, the position clicked with the mouse is recognized, and characters are acquired one after another on each of the left and right sides until there is a blank space, and the word specified by the operator is recognized.

Then, memorize the coordinates of the first letter of the specified word.

FIG. 13 is a flowchart of the process of step 4 in FIG. 11. Below, each step will be explained in order. Note that here, the rewriting of the substitute verb jl d o1+ is taken as an example.

! Above: In the text of FIG. 9(a), the word "dO", which may act as a substitute verb, is specified, and a sentence containing this word is targeted for syntactic analysis. FIG. 10 is a diagram showing the result of syntactic analysis of the sentence. When the syntax analysis is completed, the dictionary information given to the word tL d OP+ is sent to the child.

Determine whether 扛口yo is a 17th substitute verb. i.e. the word”
In addition to being used as a substitute verb, "do" can also be used as a finite verb such as an intransitive verb or a transitive verb, but as a result of syntactic analysis, by looking at the information attached to II d 0+1 or finite verb II d
OF+ can be easily determined. In FIG. 10, what is written below the terminal symbol of the syntactic analysis result is information regarding the part of speech given to each word. <aux> indicates that "Jldo" is not a finite verb but a substitute verb, and (pres,) indicates that it is in the present tense.At this time, if it turns out that LdJ+ is not a substitute, rewrite it. The process is terminated by indicating to the operator that the process cannot be performed.

If OI+ is a substitute verb, follow the node that dominates word 11 d OH in the parse tree toward the root, and skip the first S node encountered. Then, it searches for a vP node that is a child node of the S node (S□ node in FIG. 10) encountered next.

5te1819; Next, the V controlled by this VP node
Look at the syntactic analysis information of the word "reason" which is the terminal symbol of the node. Information on the word “reason” is (vil
) and (pres,), where (vil) indicates that the word is intransitive, and (pres,) indicates that the word is in the present tense.

In this case, the word 11 doI+ is the word “reas
Since the word "reason" is used instead of "on" and the tense is the same, the word "reason" is copied as is and stored in the memory.

nλ艷YO之''2; If the tenses of the two do not match, the form that matches the tense of the pronoun is extracted from the dictionary and then stored in memory.

FIG. 9(b) shows the state immediately after the substitute verb 1tdJT has been rewritten into another expression.

Furthermore, if the word that is the terminal symbol of the v node is a transitive verb, both the word (=verb) and the terminal symbol string forming the object are written into memory.

In the above embodiment, the desired rewritten expression is displayed below the word, but the display is not limited to this, and may be displayed in the vicinity of the word. Furthermore, it is also possible to display the words by connecting them with a line as shown in FIG. 9(c) so that the correspondence between the word and its rewritten expression can be easily determined.

Effects--As is clear from the above explanation, the present invention has the following effects.

(1) According to the invention described in claim 1, when understanding a sentence, when a word whose meaning is unknown is encountered, it can be immediately looked up in a dictionary, and the dictionary data can be displayed near the word. Since the information can be stored in association with the dictionary, the information that has already been looked up in the dictionary can be viewed at once, and the text can be understood quickly.

(2) According to the invention set forth in claim 2, since the word instruction is one character belonging to the word, the word instruction is simplified and the overall operability is improved.

(3) According to the invention described in claim 3, extraction for a language such as English, which can be performed by surface analysis, can be efficiently performed.

Furthermore, even when words cannot be extracted correctly by surface analysis alone, such as in Japanese, morphological analysis can be used to correctly extract words.

(4) Since the relevant dictionary data can be saved together with the text, when reading the text again, there is no need to read the dictionary again, improving operability (corresponds to configuration 4)
.

(5) According to the invention described in claim 4, efficient display can be achieved by reducing the number of dictionary lookups for the same word. Also, if the same word has different translations depending on usage, part of speech, context, etc., it can be looked up in a dictionary as separate words.

(6) Control can be performed so that when several words are drawn, related information does not overlap and become invisible (corresponding to configuration 6).

(7) When related information overlaps and becomes invisible, it can be displayed in a nearby margin to prevent information from overlapping (corresponding to configuration 7).

(8) According to the invention described in claim 5, when understanding a sentence, when a word whose meaning is unknown is encountered, it is possible to immediately look it up in a dictionary, and display the dictionary data near the word. Since information can be stored in association with other information, information that has already been looked up in a dictionary can be viewed at once, making it possible to quickly understand sentences.

(9) According to the invention set forth in claim 6, since the word instruction is one character belonging to the word, the word instruction is simplified and the overall operability is improved.

(10) Since the relevant expression can be saved together with the original text, when reading the text again, it is not necessary to rewrite the words again, improving operability (corresponding to configuration 10).

(11) It is possible to obtain the effect that the correspondence between the word and the desired information can be seen at a glance (corresponding to configuration 11).

[Brief explanation of the drawing]

FIG. 1 is a block diagram for explaining one embodiment of the language understanding support device according to the present invention, FIG. 2 is a diagram showing an example of a screen display when applied to English text, and FIG. The flowchart for explaining the operation processing of the language understanding support device according to the present invention, FIG. 4, is 5 step 3 in FIG. 3.
FIG. 5 is a diagram showing an example of the screen display when applied to Japanese text, FIG. 6 is a diagram showing the results of morphological analysis of Japanese character strings, and FIG. 7 is a flowchart of the processing. A diagram showing an example of a screen display when desired dictionary information is connected, FIG. 8 is a configuration diagram for explaining another embodiment of the language understanding support device according to the present invention, and FIG. A diagram showing a display example when the present invention is applied to English text,
FIG. 10 is a diagram showing the syntactic analysis result of a sentence including the designated word in a tree structure, and FIGS. 11, 12, and 13 are for explaining the operation of the language understanding support device according to the present invention. This is another flowchart. 1... Processing device, 2... Memory, 3... Document file. 4... Word dictionary, 5... Display control device, 6... Display device, 7... Word extraction device, 8... Dictionary search device,
9... Printing device, 1o... Input device. Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 2 Figure 5 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 (a) (b) Figure 9 (c) Figure 10 (pna8) <prer+) Figure 11 Figure 12

Claims (1)

[Scope of Claims] 1. Input means for inputting sentences, display means for displaying the sentences inputted by the input means and processing results, and words indicating words in the sentences displayed by the display means an instruction means, a word dictionary storing translation information and usage example information of a plurality of words, a dictionary search means for performing a dictionary lookup of the word specified by the word instruction means, and a display means for displaying the dictionary information of the word. a display control means for displaying desired information among the displayed dictionary information near the word; and a storage means for storing the word and desired information in association with each other. Comprehension support device. 2. The language understanding support device according to claim 1, wherein the word instruction means comprises a character instruction means for specifying a character in a sentence, and a word extraction means for extracting a word including the specified character. . 3. The language understanding support device according to claim 2, wherein the word extraction means comprises either surface analysis or morphological analysis. 4. The language understanding support device according to claim 1, wherein the dictionary search means is configured to be able to re-look up words that have already been looked up in the dictionary. 5. An input means for inputting a sentence, a display means for displaying the sentence inputted by the input means and the processing result, and a word instruction means for indicating a certain kind of word in the sentence displayed by the display means. , a syntactic analysis means for identifying a sentence including the word indicated by the word instruction means using a word dictionary and an analysis grammar, and performing a syntactic analysis process, based on the result of the analysis process by the syntactic analysis means; an original document replacement means for rewriting a word in the original text into a different expression; a display control means for displaying the new expression by the original document replacement means in the vicinity of the previously instructed word; and a memory for storing the word and the new expression in association with each other. A language understanding support device characterized by comprising: means. 6. The language understanding support device according to claim 5, wherein the word instruction means comprises a character instruction means for specifying a character in a sentence, and a word extraction means for extracting a word including the specified character. .