Saturday, September 13, 2008

Dictionary Usability II

More beef with electronic dictionaries. Well, more accurately, more features that I think would benefit its users.

So, traditionally, dictionaries are sorted alphabetically, which works because it's an order that doesn't discriminate words. But with the advent of the computer and cross-listing, it's so easy to create different types of indexing. Say, for example, that I knew that "octogenarian" meant "someone in their eighties". How would I look up the word that meant "someone in their nineties"? Well, there is a wildcard search, so I could look for {*genarian}, and click through the resulting list:
nonagenarian
octogenarian
quadragenarian
quinquagenarian
quintagenarian
septuagenarian
sexagenarian
super-septuagenarian
And that could be great, if you have some Latin training, 'cause then it'd be a quick inspection of the prefixes to figure out which one you want.

But what if I wanted to know the adjective for "liver" and only knew that "renal" was an adj. that pertained to the organ "kidney"? Well, there is a round-about way under "advanced search", where you can look for words in the definition, as well as specifying the part of speech (in this case, to narrow searches for adjectives only). But that's still a bit clumsy.

Now, say I knew that the adj. for hedgehog was "erinaceous", only because I saw a lexicographical online lecture on the TED website. how would I look up the adjectives of other animals? OED doesn't really offer anything, and of course you could do the backward "advanced" search, but it still doesn't organise your searches in an intelligent manner.

So, I think that with the definitions should be a list of related terms that aren't lexically similar, for easy clicking. So under liver would be its definitions, and then "related terms: renal, "

Saturday, September 6, 2008

I.T XX

On facebook, I saw a photo labeled as "[male cousin] with girlfriend!" Having been made aware that the cousin in question had been single for a long time, I was quite curious, so I decided to check out the 60-photo album. Apparently my cousin decided to go to a party in HK called "I.T XX" (20 yrs of I.T), and apparently a lot of the HK celebs were there. From the photos, the theme/caption was "is a season of celebration for twentieth birthday [sic]".


Is it just me, or does that read somewhat awkwardly? At first, knowing absolutely nothing about the event, I assumed that it was some sort of party for 20-yr olds. But that wouldn't make sense, since most of my HK cousins are well over 30 by now. (But from what I've read online, the organisation of the party was a rough equivalent to that expected from a 20-yr old. But the "1988/2008" tag was a clue, and so I assumed that it was a 20th anniversary

Anyway, from the other photos, I couldn't find any evidence of Chinese text, which suggests that the awkwardly phrased slogan was intended to refer to the company (I.T) anniversary. Sure, they could have been trying to be artistic with the birthday/anniversary thing, but there are still two places in the phrase that strike me as being particularly problematic.

1. "... of celebration for ..."
My first immediate instinct was to change it into a gerund: "is a season of celebrating for twentieth birthday"

2. "...for twentieth birthday"
Normally, the noun phrase that follows a preposition is complete with its determiner. For example:
(1) Around the time he was sick
(2) *Around time he was sick
So it should either be
(3) "...for a twentieth birthday," or
(4) "...for twentieth birthdays."
And even then, there are more standard phrases to express similar sentiments in the industry. "Celebrating 20 years of young fashion!" seems to work pretty well.

Another thing I don't get is the use of "season". Anniversaries for corporations and companies don't generally have seasons associated with them, unlike religious/cultural holidays (eg: winter for Christmas, Easter in spring, autumn for halloween and thanksgiving, etc.) So what season, exactly, are they trying to reference? (And especially in a place like HK, which is riight on the border of the Tropic of Cancer, are there really any seasons to speak of?) Moreover, it's usually at the 25-yr mark that they have the huge celebrations. Silver Anniversary and all that.

Normally I wouldn't care so much about the less-than-natural English that gets churned out in East Asia, but having been a British colony for a century (technically 99 years), you'd think they would have a better handle on the language, or at least have better trained translators on hand. Then again, if the organisation of the party was as terrible as people are making it out to be, it shouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't bother with a professional translator.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Dictionary Usability

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a TED talk by a lexicographer. Now I'll follow up with a tangential response (which is to say, some of the ideas in this post are inspired by her talk).

The definition of a dictionary isn't as simple as people might think. We often think of dictionaries as those books that have an alphabetical list of words, each word (or entry) followed by an explanation. But what about "rhyming dictionaries" that don't define anything at all? Those are merely lists of words grouped by similar sounds. And of course, "translation dictionaries" which usually do little more than list the most likely synonyms in the target language. When you think about it, the term "dictionary" isn't well-defined at all.

But moving on to the classical notion of dictionaries. We're progressing towards a digital era, in which (we hope) the power necessary to support computers and servers are less harmful to the environment than the deforestation necessary to produce physical-book dictionaries. The electronic "search" function is certainly handier than physically having to flip through pages of other words. And the current OED online has a menu on the left that lists lexically similar entries, just like a real dictionary.

One area that it fails in, however, is in its ability to guess the word you intended to search, if you mistyped or misspelt it. Google does this pretty well though. Searching {"fedutiary"} will get you to "the nearest alphabetical match-point is displayed in the side-frame", which in this case was pretty useless. (The side-frame gets set at "fay", which is pretty far from "fedutiary".) Google is equally useless for searches containing "fedutiary", but will give a suggestion if "feduciary" is entered. ("Did you mean fiduciary?") Despite its relatively lower prestige, dictionary.com is even better, suggesting "fiduciary" for both searches {"feduciary"} and {"fedutiary"}.

My knowledge of programming is pretty limited, but even in turing, it'd be pretty easy to at least generate common alternatives to sound clusters. (eg. {"-ciary", "-tiary", "-siary"}, {"-e-", "-i-", "-ei-", etc.}). And yet, OED hasn't bothered. I wonder what's holding them up.