Context based system for accessing dictionary entries

• US 5,845,306 A
• Filed: 07/23/1997
• Issued: 12/01/1998
• Est. Priority Date: 06/01/1994
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Binary Services LLC (Intellectual Ventures LLC)
• Original Assignee: Mitsubishi Electric Information Technology Center America, Inc. (Mitsubishi Electric Corporation)
• Inventors: Schabes, Yves, Roche, Emmanuel, Golding, Andrew R.
• Primary Examiner(s): Tkacs, Stephen R.
• Application Number:
  US08/899,004
• Time in Patent Office: 496 Days
• Field of Search: 395/751, 395/752, 395/757, 395/760, 395/792, 395/793, 395/794, 395/795, 395/601, 395/602, 395/607, 395/615, 704/7, 704/8, 704/9, 704/10, 707/1, 707/2, 707/7, 707/100, 707/102, 707/104, 707/500, 707/530, 707/531, 707/532, 707/533
• US Class Current: 715/209
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/211 Syntactic parsing, e.g. based on context-free grammar [CFG] or unification grammars
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/232 Orthographic correction, e.g. spell checking or vowelisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/242 Dictionaries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/253 Grammatical analysis; Style critique
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/268 Morphological analysis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/55 Rule-based translation
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99937 Sorting

Abstract

A context-based dictionary entry access system includes selecting and rang an entry based on the part-of-speech assigned to the given word in a sentence. The entries corresponding to the word in context are first selected, followed by availability of entries that are not relevant to the current context. The part of speech of the given word in context is selected based on the utilization of a part-of-speech tagger such that only those entries are selected in which the corresponding word makes syntactic sense in the sentence.

Claims

1. A method for providing rapid and convenient presentation of dictionary definitions of a word in a sentence so as to minimize the time necessary to ascertain the appropriate definition of said word from a list of possible definitions of said word, comprising the steps of:

providing a dictionary of definitions of words listed by parts of speech;

tagging the words in said sentence so as to obtain the part of speech of said word; and

,

looking up that definition of said word corresponding to the part of speech thereof in said sentence in said dictionary and displaying multiple definitions of said word, with the dictionary definition corresponding to the part of speech of said word displayed first, thus to provide a convenient context-based dictionary lookup method.