EDUCATIONAL MULTIMEDIA DICTIONARY
Yannis Kotsanis Doukas School S.A.
Mesogion 151, Maroussi 151 25, Greece
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
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sis for Educational Multimedia Dictionary, Tech.
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gram “DIALOGOS”, Co-ordinator ILSP, support-
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Ohmayl E. (1992) Simulation - Based Language Learn-
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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