Online Generic Editing of Heterogeneous Dictionary Entries in Papillon Project

Online Generic Editing of Heterogeneous Dictionary Entries in Papillon Project Mathieu MANGEOT Unit Terjemahan Melalui Komputer Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800, Pulau Pinang Malaysia mathieu@mangeot.org David THEVENIN National Institute of Informatics Hitotsubashi 2-1-2-1913 Chiyoda-ku JP-101-8430 Tokyo Japan thevenin@nii.ac.jp Abstract The Papillon project is a collaborative project to establish a multilingual dictio- nary on the Web. This project started 4 years ago with French and Japanese. The partners are now also working on English, Chinese, Lao, Malay, Thai and Vietnamese. It aims to apply the LINUX cooperative construction paradigm to establish a broad- coverage multilingual dictionary. Users can contribute directly on the server by adding new data or correcting existing errors. Their contributions are stored in the user space until checked by a specialist before being fully integrated into the database. The re- sulting data is then publicly available and freely distributable. An essential condition for the success of the project is to find a handy solution for all the participants to be able to contribute online by editing dictio- nary entries.In this paper, we describe our solution for an online generic editor of dic- tionary entries based on the description of their structure. 1 Introduction The Papillon Project (S´erasset and Mangeot, 2001) is a cooperative project for a multilin- gual dictionary on the Web with the following languages: English, Chinese, French, Japanese, Lao, Malay, Thai and Vietnamese. The dic- tionary structure makes it very simple to add a new language at any time. It aims to ap- ply the LINUX construction paradigm to estab- lish a multilingual usage dictionary with broad- coverage. This project is based on the participation of voluntary contributors. In order to be really attractive, this project must imperatively find a convenient solution so that contributors can easily edit the dictionary entries. Since Papillon dictionary is available on a web server and the contributors are located all around the world, the obvious solution is to implement an editor available online. Unfortunately, the existing so- lutions (HTML forms, java applets) have impor- tant limitations. Thus, we propose an entirely generic solution that can adapt very easily not only the interfaces to the various entry struc- tures needing to be edited but also to the user needs and competences. Firstly, we outline the issue addressed in this paper; and draw up an overview of the existing methods for dictionary entry edition. A presen- tation of the chosen method follows detailing its integration in the Papillon server. Finally, we show an example of the online edition of a dictionary entry. 2 Addressed Issue and Requirements In this paper, the addressed issue is how to edit online dictionary entries with heteroge- neous structures. 2.1 Online Edition In order to build a multilingual dictionary that covers a lot of languages, we need large compe- tences in those languages. It may be possible to find an expert with enough knowledge of 3 or 4 languages but when that number reaches 10 languages (like now), it is almost impossi- ble. Thus, we need contributors from …

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