JPS6170662A - Dictionary retrieving device - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To retrieve the word at the head of a sentence in a normal word dictionary correctly by retrieving the word dictionary for an alphabet character string which contains capital characters even with an alphabet character string whose capital characters are converted into small characters. CONSTITUTION:When an alphabet character string (e.g. Professor) is inputted at an input part 1, it is sent to a capital/small letter decision part 11 to send 'Professor' to a dictionary retrieval part 13, and it is also decided that P is a capital letter; and a capital/small letter conversion part 12 performs conversion to P and an alphabet character string 'professor' is also sent to the dictionary retrieval part 12. The dictionary retrieval part 13 retrieves a word dictionary storage device 14 to output a word corresponding both alphabet character strings.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION [Technical Field of the Invention] The present invention relates to a dictionary search device for searching a word dictionary corresponding to a character string inputted, for example, in the alphabet.

[Technical background of the invention and its problems] Conventionally, when searching a word dictionary from an input English sentence in an English-Japanese machine translation system, it is difficult to determine whether the first capital letter of the sentence is capitalized because it is the beginning of the sentence or whether it was originally a capital letter. There is no way to determine whether it is a word. When searching for ``Kogoji 1゜'', if the word was searched as is, there was a problem that the corresponding word could not be searched even if the word was capitalized because it was the beginning of the sentence.

In other words, in order to perform a correct dictionary search, words with the first letter capitalized had to be registered in two word dictionaries as well. This was applied to almost all words starting with a lowercase letter, requiring about twice the capacity of the word dictionary.

[Purpose of the invention]

The present invention has been made in view of this point, and its object is to provide a dictionary search device that can correctly search words at the beginning of sentences in a normal word dictionary.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION The present invention searches a word dictionary for alphabetic character strings including uppercase letters, even if the alphabetic character strings are converted to lowercase letters.

〔Effect of the invention〕

According to the present invention, the practicality is improved because words at the beginning of sentences can be searched correctly in the dictionary without registering words with the first letter capitalized in the dictionary.

[Embodiments of the invention]

EMBODIMENT OF THE INVENTION Hereinafter, one embodiment 1ζ of the present invention will be described with reference to the drawings.

FIG. 1 shows the overall configuration of an embodiment of the present invention.

Input unit 1, upper/lower case determination unit 2, upper/lower case conversion unit 3, word dictionary search unit 4, word dictionary storage device 5, output unit 6
have.

Alphabetic character strings input from the input section 1 are sequentially supplied to the case determination section 2. The uppercase/lowercase character determination unit 2 sends the supplied alphabetic character string to the word dictionary search unit 4, and determines whether it contains uppercase letters.
If it is included, the input alphabetic character string is supplied to the case conversion unit 3.

The case conversion unit 3 converts the uppercase letters included in the supplied alphabet character string into lowercase letters and sends the converted letters to the dictionary search unit 4. The dictionary search unit 4 refers to the word dictionary storage device and outputs the word corresponding to the supplied alphabet character string to the output unit 6.

Here, the word dictionary search section d5 is a storage device for storing necessary information as a table, and is, for example, a magnetic disk device.

Next, a specific example will be explained according to FIG.

Now, let us consider, for example, a case where a dictionary is searched by inputting the alphabetic character string ``Professor J''.

Here, it is assumed that the word dictionary storage device 14 stores the word dictionary shown in the figure.

The input alphabet string [Professor
J is sent to the case determination unit 11. The case determination unit 11 selects “Professor j” from the dictionary search unit 1.
3 and determines that the bolt is an uppercase letter. This "P" is converted into "p" by the case converting section 12, and the alphabetic character string "professorJ" is sent to the dictionary search section 131ζ.

The dictionary search unit 13 searches the word dictionary storage device 14 for "
ProfessorJ and l'-professorJ
Output the word corresponding to each.

In this way, when ``ProfessorJ'' is input, i types of words corresponding to ``Professor J I'' and f-professorj are output.

This operation is detailed in chart 70 of FIG.

As described above, according to the present invention, it is possible to provide a dictionary search device that can perform a correct dictionary search for input alphabet character strings including uppercase letters without requiring several times the dictionary capacity.

Note that the present invention is not limited to the above embodiments. For example, you may search a dictionary by converting lowercase letters to uppercase letters.

In short, the present invention can be implemented with various modifications without departing from the gist thereof.

[Brief explanation of drawings]

, FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of the present invention,
FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a data flow for explaining the same embodiment, and FIG. 3 is a flowchart for explaining the operation in the same embodiment. 1...Input section 2.11...Upper/lower case determination section 3.12...Upper/lower case conversion section 5.14...Word dictionary storage device 6...Output section Representative patent attorney Noriyuki Chikanori (1 other person), Figure 1 Figure 2

Claims (1)

[Claims] The apparatus includes an input means for inputting a character string, a word dictionary storage means for storing word information in advance, and a dictionary search means for reading out word information from the word dictionary storage means in response to the character string input from the input means. If the character string includes uppercase letters, the dictionary search device is characterized in that when the character string includes uppercase letters, the word dictionary is also searched for the character string in which the uppercase letters are converted to lowercase letters.