Between Understanding and Translating: A Context-Sensitive Comprehension Tool

This paper introduces an English–Polish/Polish–English comprehension tool. In fact, it is a special electronic dictionary which is sensitive to the context of the input words or expressions. The dictionary program provides translations for any piece of text displayed on a computer screen without requiring user interaction. This functionality is provided by a three-layer process: (1) text acquisition from the screen, (2) morpho-syntactic analysis of the context of the selected word and (3) the dictionary lookup. By dividing dictionary entries into smaller pieces and indexing them individually, the program is able to display a restricted set of information that is as relevant to the context as possible. For this purpose, we utilize automatic and semi-automatic XML tools for processing dictionary content. The construction of such an electronic dictionary involves natural language processing at almost every point of operation. Both dictionary entries and user input require linguistic analysis and intelligent pattern-matching techniques in order to identify multi-word expressions in the context of the input. An on-going research makes the program incorporate more sophisticated language technology: multi-word phrases and sentences are recognized, and translation hints are offered in an intelligent way – by a parser/transformer module matching underspecified patterns of different degrees of abstraction