EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY

Yannis Kotsanis Doukas School S.A.

Mesogion 151, Maroussi 151 25, Greece

kotsanis@doukas.gr

http://www.doukas.gr

ABSTRACT

The "Educational Multimedia Dictionary" (EMD)

is a computer based reference and training tool of

lexical data and aspects of the Greek Language re-

lated to them. EMD is a user-friendly, interactive

and explorative multimedia environment (with a

“book” metaphor), which includes well-defined

educational material for use in individual, group

and classroom study, especially designed for chil-

dren between ages 8-14. The EMD educational

software is based on a user environment, which

contains the electronic dictionaries with 8 linguis-

tic games and a supporting environment, which

undertakes the management and processing of lex-

ical and audio-visual databases of the system. It

has been developed within the framework of the

research program DIALOGOS: Improvement of

Man-Machine Communication using Language

Technology, under the ILSP co-ordination (GSRT,

EPET-II).

Keywords: educational multimedia software, ma-

chine-readable dictionaries, lexical databases, lin-

guistic games, Greek language.

1. INTRODUCTION

The “Educational Multimedia Dictionary” (EMD)

is a teaching and reference multimedia tool which

was developed (by Exodus S.A.) within the

framework of the project “DIALOGOS: Improve-

ment of Man and Machine Communication with

the use of Language Technology” (supported by

the grant: EPET II, General Secretariat of Re-

search and Development, Project 715, Coordina-

tor: Institute for Language and Speech Processing -

ILSP, 1996-98), focusing on lexical and related da-

ta of the modern Greek language.

It is known that students learn best when they are

actively involved in the learning process and when

there is more than one media involved. The great

advantage of multimedia is that they provide both

these positive learning contexts in a way that mo-

tivates trainees. Hypermedia can make the teacher

act as facilitator/handler of information and stu-

dents as active learners. In essence, hypermedia

expose students to multiple contents and contexts

by the diversity of media as well as stimulate a va-

riety of cognitive processes.

The linguistic design of the dictionary is based on

the combination of a theoretical description given

by the lexicographical model (used by ILSP) with

the pragmatic issues posed by the potential user

requirements. The definition and creation of the

macrostructure of the dictionary (i.e. the words

that will be included) and the microstructure of the

dictionary entry (what type of lexical information

is included, the features which will be used for the

codification, and how it is presented to the user)

takes into account a distinctive mode of presenta-

tion of the lexical data, that conforms to the needs

of the young user.

The “Educational Multimedia Dictionary” contains

original material in machine-readable form to be

used by individuals and tutorial groups. It is de-

signed for children between ages 8-14, providing

the interactivity and the various possibilities of

multimedia navigation. It features an ergonomic

user interface using a “book” metaphor and a

friendly but powerful data accessibility through

multiple criteria. It is based on the following two

sub-systems: a user environment, with electronic

dictionaries and various multimedia linguistic

games, and a system environment, with lexical and

audio-visual data bases, that include the text,

graphics, images and sounds of the dictionary. The

construction of the EMD profited from existing

dictionaries, in regards to design and the already

coded existing linguistic data.

In its current version the EMD contains:

5.500 lemmas with definitions (basic mean-

ing), examples, etymology, hyphenation, syn-

onyms, antonyms, morphological and gram-

matical features and pronunciation,

3.000 lemmas with logical related words,

70.000 derivatives and compound words with

related information,

160.000 inflected words – types in ortho-

graphic or phonetic form (alphabetical order

from left to right and from right to left), relat-

ed to morpho-syntactic features,

1.200 pictures and graphics related to lemmas

and 500 sounds produced by the object of ref-

erence.

2. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM

The Educational Multimedia Dictionary includes

two basic sub-systems:

the user environment, which corresponds to

the user interface modules of the system, and

the supporting environment, which undertakes

the management and processing of the lexical

and audio-visual data of the system.

The modules of the user environment are:

the electronic dictionary, which accesses, re-

trieves and cross refers (with multiple criteria)

the morphological, grammatical, semantic and

audio-visual data of a well-defined educational

lexicon,

various linguistic games, which use all the lex-

ical and audio-visual data provided by the sys-

tem,

The user interacts with these modules of the sys-

tem through the conceptual navigator, which is

based on the “book” metaphor (see figure on the

next page). Using this navigator the user can con-

tinuously access all the lexical and audio-visual

data of the electronic dictionary and selects the de-

sired options/criteria by clicking on the tools of the

book surface.

The supporting environment consists of three main

modules:

the morphological analyser which recognises

the structure of the Greek words and produces

or generates their inflected forms.

the data base manager, which is used for the

retrieval of the available data, and

the four databases of the system, which con-

tain all the data of the multimedia dictionary.

A sample of the contents of data bases follows:

a. lexical db: lexical entries, definitions, exam-

ples, synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, in-

flected forms, etymological, grammatical,

morphological and semantic information,

hypertext links,

b. audio db: pronunciation for each lemma,

sounds produced by defined items (e.g. ani-

mals, tools), music themes,

c. visual db: sketches, graphics, photographs,

and

d. user db: data defined by the user of the pro-

gram.

3. THE DICTIONARIES

All information of EMD is categorised in the following

4 Dictionaries:

Base (ΕΡΜΗΝΕΥΤΙΚΟ), lexical & audio-visual in

formation

Morphological (ΚΛΙΤΙΚΟ), inflected wordforms

Derivational (ΠΑΡΑΓΩΓΙΚΟ), derivatives &

compounds

Logical (ΛΟΓΙΚΟ). semantically related word

groups

In the layout of the screen one of these sub-dictionaries

is in the foreground and the other in the background. A

background sub-dictionary becomes foreground just

clicking on it. Interactivity with the application is

achieved through the labels (options for the way that the

information is presented) on the top of the book and the

"miniature" tools at the bottom (buttons for help, back,

set a bookmark, search, forward, print, stop).

The most demanding task of EMD application was the

MORPHOLOGICAL DICTIONARY. For the creation

of this lexicon we adopted the following procedure:

1. Design the macrostructure of the lexical resource

for which all morphological derivations are

sought.

2. Choose a suitable existing generic morphological,

analyser, for Modern Greek.

3. Feed the lexical resource to the morphological an-

alyser

4. Produce:

- all possible annotations for each wordform (pro-

cess of wordform recognition)

- all wordforms generated for each lemma (process

of generation)

5. Store all wordforms in a DBMS is an appropriate

schema

The grounds on which this approach is justified are:

the macrostructure of the dictionary is small (8,000

entries)

no problems with storage capacity in the present

technology were anticipated

better control over data by simplified storage of all

and only the correct forms of each lemma will be

gained

The tool we chose to use is the ILSP morphological an-

alyser and its supporting lexicon. The ILSP morpholog-

ical analyser is a tool which, by looking-up into the

ILSP Morphological Lexicon:

assigns the correct lemma to a given wordform,

assigns morphological features to given word-

forms,

produces all inflected wordforms to a given lem-

ma.

The lexicon entries encode the following information

for each lemma:

special features

stress position

stress movement

grammatical features

identity: word / stem / ending

grammatical category (part of speech)

number: singular / plural

case: nominative / genitive / accusative / non-

inflected

gender: masculine, feminine / gender / common /

masc - fem

person: first / second / third

tense: present / past / future

voice: active / passive

mood: indicative / imperative / subjunctive / infini-

tive / participle

Based on this method for storage and retrieval EMD

support the following queries - searches:

by lemma (all word forms are produced with ap-

propriate morphological features)

by wordform (the tool acts as lemmatiser)

by string of characters (initial, middle of final posi-

tion characters)

by orthographic or phonetic incorrect form (similar

words or wordforms are produced)

The following screen presents an example that

combines aphonetic and reverse string character

search for the string "ipi" (γρίπη, κήποι, λίπη, ε-

γκαταλείπει etc).

An additional retrieval support of EMD is the search by

illustration, (shown in the following screen).

4. THE LINGUISTIC GAMES

At the linguistic games module the user is at first

faced with a map of central Athens where several

pictures of well known libraries are drawn on as

“hot spots”. The student is supposed to visit each

of those libraries by clicking on the related picture.

As soon as s/he moves in the building s/he is asked

to play a linguistic game. In order for the student

to successfully pass to the next game, some ques-

tions need to be answered in each game.

The Multimedia Crossword is an example of lin-

guistic game. It is either the definition of the word

in question or sound or a picture of it that is given

as a clue to help the student find the appropriate

word. Besides the lexical data base of synonyms

and antonyms along with the sound data base

which are incorporated to the supporting environ-

ment of the system also feed the multimedia

crossword with synonyms, antonyms or the sound

of the objects.

Apart from the multimedia crossword there is an-

other game close to that, called the Acrostic. In this

case the student creates vertically a word each let-

ter of which is the first letter of a horizontal word.

The lexical as well as the audio-visual databases

provide the acrostic with the clues too.

There are also games with hidden words and/or

matches, which aim at the construction of other

words, made up from randomly chosen letters, syl-

lables or affixes. They also aim at the formation of

derived and compound words using multiple

grammatical and semantic criteria.

As for the user environment, the linguistic games

appear, exactly like the lexica, within the two pag-

es of an open book. In specific, on the left page the

multimedia crossword or the acrostic appears al-

most in the middle of the page, while few instruc-

tions on how the game is played are placed at the

bottom of the page. On the right page the clues are

numbered respectively to the answers.

What also remains the same as in the lexical user

environment is the letters along both sides of the

pages sorted out in alphabetical order. The student

may return to the lexicon to find out the meaning

and the examples of the usage of an unknown

word by only clicking on a letter, which is the first

one of the word, in question.

At the end of each game and after the student has

tried to answer to the questions s/he collects as

many points as the right answers are. The points of

all the games are added and up to a certain number

the student earns a voucher which is printed out

and is to be exchanged with either a book or a CD-

ROM of his/her choice from a multimedia store.

5. CONCLUSION

Apart from the apparent advantages that the tech-

nology offers, the suggested Educational Multime-

dia Dictionary contributes to the:

improvement and enhancement of Greek lan-

guage training in a learning environment with

attractive and entertaining features,

teaching of linguistic material through general

and special vocabulary as well as terms from

various subject matters,

assistance of morphological and, in general,

linguistic analysis of literary and other texts

and also to the writing of essays,

conservation of the Greek language tradition

through a new approach,

need for a large demand for language tools by

schools and training centres.

The above system, as an educational product, takes

advantage of the language teaching and other sub-

ject matter taught in schools. It can be used in var-

ious areas of the educational curriculum, from

schools to organisations that possess the required

technical infrastructure.

6. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

DiSessa A., Hoyles C., Noss R. (1995), Computers

and Exploratory Learning, NATO ASI Series

F:146. Hofstetter F., Tway L. (1995), Multimedia Literacy, Mc

Graw Hill.

Kotsanis Y., Raptis K. et al (1998), User Needs Analy-

sis for Educational Multimedia Dictionary, Tech.

Report No 2.2.1, Doukas School (Research Pro-

gram “DIALOGOS”, Co-ordinator ILSP, support-

ed by the grant: EPET II, 715, GSRT).

Ohmayl E. (1992) Simulation - Based Language Learn-

ing, An Architecture and a Multimedia Authoring

Tool, Ph-D Dissertation, Northwestern University,

1992.

Papert S. (1993), The Children’s Machine, Rethinking

School in the Age of the Computer, Basic Books,

New York.

Soloway E. ed (1993), Special issue: Technology in

Education. Communications of the ACM, 36 (5).

Sproat R. (1992), Morphology and Computation, MIT

Press.

Tinsley J. D., Van Weert T.J., eds. (1995), Liberating

the Learner, Proceedings of the 6th IFIP, World

Conference on Computers in Education (WCCE

‘95).

Zampolli A., Calzolari N. eds (1989), Automating the

Lexicon, Cambridge, MIT Press.

Comlex 2000

Computational Lexicography and

Multimedia Dictionaries

Achaia, Greece, 22-23 September 2000