Kirrkirr: A Java-based visualisation tool for XML dictionaries of Australian Languages

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Kirrkirr A Java-based visualisation tool for XML
dictionaries of Australian Languages

• Kevin Jansz
• Department of Computer Science, University of
  Sydney, Australia
• Dr. Christopher Manning
• Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford
  University, USA
• Dr. Nitin Indurkhya
• School of applied Science, Nanyang Technological
  University, Singapore

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Project Objectives

• Aims of the project
• examining the richness of lexical structure, in
  particular the connotational and figurative use
  of words
• providing innovative ways for representing a
  dictionary, through creative use of the medium of
  computers
• augmenting dictionaries from corpora
• to be able to provide practical educationally
  useful programs as a result (at low labor cost)
• Main initial target an interactive front end for
  exploring or using the Warlpiri dictionary.

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Talk Outline

• The research agendas
• Kirrkirr A Warlpiri dictionary browser
• The Lexical Database
• exploiting the strengths of XML
• indexing XML data
• User interface and visualization
• User studies

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Research Program Lexicon

• A lexicon is not just words but a vast network of
  associations between words and within and across
  the concepts represented by words
• The aim of this work is to provide people with a
  better understanding of this conceptual map.
• Traditional paper dictionaries offer very limited
  ways for making such networks visible
• On a computer, one can imagine all sorts of ways
  of bringing out such relationships

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MRD Structure

• The internal structures of current Machine
  Readable Dictionaries usually merely mimic the
  structure of the printed form (Boguraev 1990)
• Some work, notably WordNet (Miller 1995) has
  involved a fundamental rethinking of dictionary
  content and organization (here, organization via
  synsets which are related via links of part,
  subkind, opposite)
• There has been little in the way of software to
  make them truly usable by different communities
  of users.

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Initial focusKirrkirr a Warlpiri browser

• Warlpiri is an Australian Aboriginal language
  spoken in the Tanami desert (NW of Alice)
• A computer interface for browsing the Warlpiri
  dictionary.
• Rich lexical materials have been collected by
  linguists over decades (Hales fieldwork from
  1959 on, MIT Lexicon Project in the 1980s)
• Before Kirrkirr, results still havent been
  produced in a format usable by the community
  (only printouts)

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Our educational goals

• There are a number of reasons for focusing on
  Warlpiri for this electronic bilingual dictionary
  
• There has been a large amount of research on
  Warlpiri creating one of the most comprehensive
  lexical databases for any Australian Language
• There is a relatively large community of people
  interested in learning their traditional language
• The low level of literacy in the region makes an
  e-dictionary potentially more useful than a paper
  edition as it is less dependent on good knowledge
  of spelling and alphabetical order. Making it fun
  and easy to use is a considerable help as well.
• Features such as being able to point and click,
  and hear the words take the emphasis away from
  knowing the written form of the word before the
  system is used

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Target user community
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Kirrkirr A Warlpiri dictionary browser

• (Jansz 1998 Jansz, Manning and Indurkhya 1999)
• An environment for the interactive exploration of
  dictionaries.
• Although our current work has just been with
  Warlpiri, the design is general (Arrernte coming
  soon!)
• Attempts to more fully utilize graphical
  interfaces, hypertext, multimedia, and different
  ways of indexing and accessing information
• Written in Java, it can either be run over the
  web high bandwidth or run locally (here Javas
  main advantage is cross-platform support).

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Specific goals

• An interactive environment that encouraged
  exploration easy and fun to use
• Reduction of the dependence on alphabetical order
• Catering to the needs of different user groups
  (kids, teachers, professionals)
• Flexible enough to display appropriate
  information in appropriate ways depending on user
  level

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Overview

• Kirrkirr provides various modules
• Graph layout of word relationships
• Formatted dictionary entries
• Semantic domain browsing
• A notes facility for jotting in the margin
• Multimedia audio, pictures
• Advanced searching interfaces
• others in planning formatting (XSL) editing,
  figuration patterns
• These attempt to cater to users with different
  competence levels

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(Kirrkirr screen shot)
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The lexical database

• Existing materials are stored in an ad hoc format
  of markup using backslash codes with some (rather
  odd) nesting of structural tags
• These were converted to XML using an
  error-correcting stack-based parser (written in
  PERL).
• The inconsistency and flexibility of dictionary
  entries actually made this a surprisingly
  difficult task.
• But parser tries to impose data integrity
• Use of XML gives a clear structure to the data,
  and makes available many (free) tools

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XML

• XML separates the structure of the data from its
  presentation
• Much of the recent enthusiasm for XML has
  centered around representing simple and rigid
  structures such as database records
• The rich hierarchical and variable structure of
  dictionary entries is really more what something
  like XML excels at!
• Result remains a portable, tangible text file

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Alternative a database

• The obvious thing for storing a lot of data
• Has clear advantages structure, indexing, query
  language, relationships, integrity.
• Many people have suggested using a database for
  lexical data and some have actually done it
  (IITLEX, Austin and Nathan)
• But in general lexicographers oppose the
  rigidity, and, in practice, standard relational
  databases are quite ill-suited to dictionaries

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Problems with Relational Database

• Dictionary entries vary enormously
• Data is fragmented
• Dictionaries are only loosely structured
• Same element can appear at many levels (dialect,
  cross-reference, )
• Database model is inflexible to extending the
  dictionary structure
• Lessens portability

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XML indexing - challenges

• Despite the various XML parsers available, it is
  surprising that there has been little
  consideration in making single entries retrivable
  from the file
• Present XML Parsers tend to put the entire XML
  document in memory (or some form of it) in
  memory, before the data extraction process begins
• This is not practical when parsing significant
  XML databases (eg. the Warlpiri dictionary is
  approx. 10Mb).

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XML Indexing - solutions

• The heirachial structure of XML lends itself to
  indexing, as each separate entry in the XML file
  can be considered as a separate entity
• To make the Warlpiri dictionary usable for
  Kirrkirr an ad hoc indexing system was developed
• Uses a slightly modified Ælfred parser
• Entries are indexed by headword
• The system returns an XML document object
  containing the single dictionary entry,
  facilitating
• processing for related words (Graph layout)
• XSL processing to HTML

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XML Indexing - solutions (2)

• The use of the XML indexing process considerably
  improves effeciency as only requested entries are
  parsed, hence consering time and bandwidth
• Once whole entries are parsed, they are kept
  temporarily in a cache
• Thus the System uses XML as a median between the
  structure and indexing of a relational database,
  with the freedom and functionality of XML.

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Kirrkirrs XML Index Process
Index in Memory
Kirrkirr
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XML document object
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XQL - Potential
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Visualization of dictionary information

• For applications with simple textual content
  behind them, there is little that can be done but
  an on-line reflection of a printed page
• But we want more than just definitions of words
  we want to know their relationships to other
  words, and the patterning in these relationships
• In a computational approach, can mediate between
  the lexical data and the user
• The interface can select from and choose how to
  present information (according to the users
  preferences) in many different ways

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Previous work

• Current systems present the search-dominated
  interface of classic Information Retrieval
  systems you type a word in a search box
• Results try to mimic, but are generally inferior
  to, the printed version of the dictionary
• Good feature rapid searching
• These systems do little to utilize the
  captivating qualities of computers
  interactivity, user control and adaptability
  (Brown 1985).

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Previous work (2)

• Only effective when user has a clearly specified
  information need even here, we are ignoring the
  distinction between information gained and
  knowledge sought (Sharpe 1995)
• Lack browsing, and chances for incidental or
  curiosity driven learning
• Lack tangibility and situatedness of paper
  ineffective for getting an idea of a collection
• We wish to exploit the essence of hypertext,
  which is click to explore browsing

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Previous work (3)

• Little research work (in corpus linguistics,
  visualization etc.) on dictionary visualization
• WordNet built a rich network of relationships,
  which fundamentally departed from the paper
  dictionary tradition, and has been used in many
  computational projects
• However very little has been done in the way of
  interfaces that make these relationships visible
  and intelligible to users.
• Graphical representations seem particularly
  important given our target users.

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Graph-based visualization

• There is a little previous work on graphical
  representations of dictionaries
• For instance, the visual-thesaurus by plumbdesign
  derived from WordNet
• But it is also a good demonstration of how
  chaotic and confusing graphical interfaces can
  become.

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Graph-based visualization

• (Jansz 1998 Jansz, Manning and Indurkhya 1999)
• Classic graph layout problem
• Adapts work by Eades et al. (1998) and Huang et
  al. (1998) on visualization and navigation of WWW
  document linkages
• Uses the spring algorithm. Big advantage is that
  it is an iterative updating algorithm, and so
  gives an easy interactivity
• it wiggles and people can play with it.
• Clarity and simplicity of graph Software
  maintains a set of focus nodes to prevent
  overcrowding

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Educational advantages

• Alphabetical order is important, but
• A web of words offers other effective
  opportunities for learning
• A student can opportunistically explore words
  that are related in various ways
• Important semantic relationships can be
  understood

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Kirrkirr network display
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Kirrkirr network display
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Formatted dictionary entries

• Are produced automatically from the XML by using
  XSL (James Clarks XT)
• XSL allows easy modeling of some user
  preferences.
• Most trivially, one can leave out information
  such as part of speech, or detailed definitions
• This is useful as many users find information
  overload quite confusing and demotivating
• Can produce bilingual or monolingual dictionary
• Opportunities for various output styles, and
  formats such as RTF or TeX for printing.

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Formatted dictionary entries
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Rich typology of link types

• The semantically rich types of linkages present
  in a dictionary (synonym, antonym, hyponym,
  subheadword, variant, coverbs, ) solves one of
  the major problems of the web we have many link
  types with a clear semantic interpretation
• Use consistent color-coded text and edges to show
  these link types
• Gives a richer browsing experience
• Can tell where you are going before clicking

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Browsing

• Work (at PARC and elsewhere Pirolli et al. 1996)
  has stressed role for browsing as well as
  searching in information access
• It provides a context for learning
• We provide browsing in several ways
• conventional hypertext
• but with rich semantically-interpreted links
• their color-coding matches network edges
• network-based display of words
• browsing through semantic domains
• Such cultural information is hard to learn, and
  not normally in dictionaries or thesauri
• Question can terminology sets be derived
  automatically from appropriate corpora?

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User study problems

• Since at present there is no dictionary available
  except the printed out database complete with
  markup codes, it was hard for many people to
  judge the use of the interface, since there was
  no point of comparison.
• First impressions only It would have been good
  to let people try it out at their leisure, but
  unfortunately not possible (NT Ed all Macintosh,
  MRJ 2.1 shipping deadlines slipped past our study
  date)

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User study

• Mim Corris (Yuendumu, Willowra)
• User testing with primary and (lower) secondary
  students
• Comments from teachers, other adults etc.
• Purely qualitative observational study of
  dictionary use
• (Doing anything much else would be difficult.)
• Initial reactions are very enthusiastic
• Could use as a basis for classroom activities
  (better with some further development games and
  puzzles)

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Conclusions

• Kirrkirr is just a prototype of what one can do
  to visualize dictionaries
• We have addressed the challenge of making
  dictionary information usable in the creation of
  an application which mediates between
  well-structured data and users needs for
  searching/browsing and presentation
• While we have focused our research on Warlpiri,
  the system can be easily applied to other
  languages

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Conclusions (cont.)

• ... The best future applications of MRDs in
  education will be those most able to respond to
  the insights and needs of their users (Kegl
  1995)
• Kirrkirr can be seen as a step towards the future
  of e-dictionaries

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