Insertion of translation in displayed text consisting of grammatical variations pertaining to gender, number and tense

• US 9,053,098 B2
• Filed: 05/25/2012
• Issued: 06/09/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 01/14/2010
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: ABBYY Production LLC (ABBYY Software)
• Original Assignee: ABBYY Development LLC
• Inventors: Levchenko, Dmitry, Kozlova, Elvira
• Primary Examiner(s): Kazeminezhad, Farzad
• Application Number:
  US13/481,644
• Publication Number:
  US 20120245922A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,110 Days
• Field of Search: 704/4, 704/7
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/018 Input/output arrangements for oriental characters
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0485 Scrolling or panning
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/58 Use of machine translation, e.g. for multi-lingual retrieval, for server-side translation for client devices or for real-time translation

Abstract

A computer method and an electronic device enable a user to lookup words and insert new words in a text based on the results of the look up. The method executed by the device includes: providing a user with a capability to select at least one word in a text displayed on the screen of the device; performing a dictionary lookup of the identified word so as to determine translation alternatives of the identified word; displaying at least some of the translation alternatives; selecting one of the displayed alternatives; determining its word forms, wherein the word forms consist of gender, number, grammatical tense and grammatical variations of the same word; selecting one of the word forms; and inserting the selected word from in the text.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

identifying, based on user input, a word in a text displayed on a screen of a device, the text consisting of a plurality of words to be translated;

performing a dictionary lookup of the word so as to determine translation alternatives of the word;

displaying a plurality of the translation alternatives of the word on the screen of the device;

selecting, based on user input, a preferred translation alternative from the plurality of translation alternatives;

determining and displaying a plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative,

wherein the word forms consist of gender, number, grammatical tense, and grammatical variations of same word;

selecting, based on user input, a selected word form from the plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative;

and inserting the selected word form in the text.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising, if the text has been stored as image data, performing a text recognition operation to extract textual information from the image data representing the text.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein performing the text recognition operation comprises applying an optical character recognition technique.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein performing the text recognition operation comprises comparing a recognition result with similar word forms obtained from a morphological dictionary.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the user input comprises one of pointer-based or haptic-based input.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the haptic-based input comprises touch-based inputs.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein the pointer-based input comprises cursor-based inputs.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the device is a handheld device with a small display area.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein the device is a smart phone and includes a cellular telephone capability.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the plurality of translation alternatives includes most likely translations corresponding to the word.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein a maximum number of translation alternatives in the plurality of translation alternatives is determined by the user.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the displaying of a plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative comprises displaying the plurality of word forms in the form of one of a pop-up window, superscript text, subscript text, and a text balloon.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein at least one of the translation alternatives and the word forms are displayed in the same pop-up window or a text balloon.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein the translation alternatives are in a language different from the language of the word.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the translation alternatives and the word are in the same language.

16. The method of claim 1, wherein inserting the selected word form in the text includes replacing the word with the selected word form, the text being in a first language and the selected word form being in a second language.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein inserting the selected word form in the text includes adding the selected word form to the text adjacent the word.

18. The method of claim 1, further comprising displaying additional ones of the translation alternatives in response to the user input.

19. The method of claim 1, wherein a representation of the displayed text is stored in the device.

20. The method of claim 1, wherein the text is at least a part of one of the following:

a document, a text message, an e-mail, or a browser input.

21. The method of claim 1, wherein the performing the dictionary lookup comprises performing morphological analysis to identify a base form of the word.

22. The method of claim 1, further comprising looking up the preferred translation alternative in a morphological dictionary, so as to determine the plurality of word forms.

23. The method of claim 1 wherein the plurality of word forms are selected based on the word form of the word.

24. The method of claim 1, further comprising displaying the plurality of translation alternatives of the word in base form.

25. The method of claim 1, further comprising displaying the plurality of translation alternatives as word forms consistent with the word form of the word.

26. The method of claim 1, further comprising displaying a detailed translation based on a specialized dictionary for one of the translation alternatives in response to a user input.

27. The method of claim 1, wherein performing the dictionary lookup comprises accessing at least one dictionary selected from the group consisting of a local dictionary and a remote dictionary.

28. The method of claim 1, further comprising playing back an audio pronunciation associated with a result of the dictionary lookup.

29. The method of claim 1 wherein identifying, based on user input, a word in a text displayed on a screen of a device comprises:

detecting user input associated with a portion of the display screen;

establishing coordinates associated with the user input; and

identifying a portion of the text associated with the coordinates.

30. The method of claim 1, further comprising displaying new text comprising the text with the selected word form inserted therein.

31. An electronic device, comprising:

a processor; and

a memory coupled to the processor, the memory storing instructions which when executed by the processor cause the system to perform a method comprising;

identifying, based on user input, a word in a text displayed on a screen of a device, the text consisting of a plurality of words to be translated;

performing a dictionary lookup of the identified word so as to determine translation alternatives of the word;

displaying a plurality of the translation alternatives of the identified word on the screen of the device;

selecting, based on user input, a preferred translation alternative from the plurality of translation alternatives of the identified word;

determining and displaying a plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative,

wherein the word forms consist of gender, number, grammatical tense, and grammatical variations of same word;

selecting, based on user input, a selected word form from the plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative;

and inserting the selected word form in the text.

32. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon a sequence of instructions which when executed by a system cause the system to perform a method, comprising:

identifying, based on user input, a word in a text displayed on a screen of a device, the text consisting of a plurality of words to be translated;

performing a dictionary lookup of the identified word so as to determine translation alternatives of the word;

displaying a plurality of the translation alternatives of the identified word on the screen of the device;

selecting, based on user input, a preferred translation alternative from the plurality of translation alternatives of the identified word;

determining and displaying a plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative,

wherein the word forms consist of gender, number, grammatical tense, and grammatical variations of same word;

selecting, based on user input, a selected word form from the plurality of word forms of the preferred translation alternative;

and inserting the selected word form in the text.