KIRRKIRR WARLPIRI DICTIONARY

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KIRRKIRR WARLPIRI DICTIONARY

• Kevin Lim
• Summer 2001
• Mentor Chris Manning

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Overall Goals Of Kirrkirr

• To go beyond the simple textual dictionary
  experience. The system seeks to be interesting,
  and take advantage of current technology to give
  the language learner a fun experience, enhanced
  with multimedia and better dictionary
  visualization.
• To meet the needs of native Warlpiri speakers and
  children, as well as being useful to professional
  linguists. The user should be able to use
  Kirrkirr with ease and excitement.
• To expose learners to content in a more flexible
  way than a paper dictionary. Rather than only
  allowing browsing by words with similar spelling,
  Kirrkirr shows words that are semantically
  related to the word you're viewing.

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Summer Progress

• Educational Activities For Children
• Visual Recognition
• Phonetic Learning
• User Interface Design and Usability
• Exploration of Dictionary by Semantic Domain
• Upgrading Multimedia / Browsing Images by Visual
  Similarity

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Designing Effective Activities

• Overall Goal To allow students to engage in
  learning activities on the computer, and to
  automate the creation of these activities to aid
  teachers
• Solution Created an array of games to choose
  from. Games stimulated different skills, from
  picture recognition, to spelling and word
  relations. More variety and difficulty level
  options suit students better.

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Improving Interface Usability

• Overall Goal To assure that the interface is
  intuitive and easy for the target audience,
  school children, to use.
• Issue The interface was very inconsistent within
  itself, and lacked feedback and learnability.
• Solution Overhaul of control methods within the
  interface. Visual feedback was added. Interface
  was made consistent (in wording and positioning)
  and various helps were added to make the system
  learnable for first-time users.

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Allowing Exploration By Meaning

• Overall Goal To allow the user to go beyond the
  common linkage offered in paper dictionaries
  (alphabetical organization, synonym/antonym
  relations) and offer a way to browse by more
  complex semantic relations.
• Issue Only preliminary semantic browsing was
  available you could only see the semantic trees
  for words youve already browsed.
• Solution Designed a semantic browser panel that
  offer the same features as the common-dictionary
  sorted panel of Kirrkirr, that sorts every word
  in the dictionary by abstract semantic domain
  (e.g. flora/fauna, weather words, motion words,
  etc.)

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Intuitive Browsing of Multimedia

• Overall Goal To provide new and useful ways of
  searching and browsing the rich content of the
  dictionary
• Issue The only way to explore the multimedia
  resources was by browsing the word entries
  relating to them.
• Solution Using visual similarity as a novel
  indexing mechanism for the content in Kirrkirr.
  The creation of the picture browser feature
  allows the user a new method to search and browse
  the dictionary.

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Conclusions

• Accomplishments Introduced new ways in which
  the dictionary could engage the attention of the
  user (games), as well as ways in which the user
  could engage and search the content of the
  dictionary (explorers). Improved the ability of
  the user to engage by enhancing the user
  interface
• Future Visions Explore other means and other
  dimensions that can be utilized in indexing and
  browsing the dictionary. Abstract image input by
  simple paint programs could make very precise
  image searches. Perhaps the inclusion of audio
  input for search (speech recognition).