Al la enhavo

Kindle and Esperanto dictionarys

de chrisim101010, 2012-majo-02

Mesaĝoj: 23

Lingvo: English

chrisim101010 (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-02 14:13:13

I finally purchased a kindle touch recently. I use Calibre to manage the eBooks and convert the formats to a .mobi so the kindle can read them. The system works well, and so far i have found no errors.
I tried to find an Esperanto electronic dictionary that will work with the kindle system. One does exist in the amazon market, but the comments left behind suggest that it only works properly with infinitives, which sounds almost useless. This raises 3 questions:
What experience do others have with the electronic dictionary available through the amazon web site?
Is there some way to get this dictionary improved?
Is there another dictionary that can be used with the kindle? (another "lernu" dictionary for the kindle would be great)

Sjdusa (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-02 15:33:39

chrisim101010:I finally purchased a kindle touch recently. I use Calibre to manage the eBooks and convert the formats to a .mobi so the kindle can read them. The system works well, and so far i have found no errors.
I tried to find an Esperanto electronic dictionary that will work with the kindle system. One does exist in the amazon market, but the comments left behind suggest that it only works properly with infinitives, which sounds almost useless. This raises 3 questions:
What experience do others have with the electronic dictionary available through the amazon web site?
Is there some way to get this dictionary improved?
Is there another dictionary that can be used with the kindle? (another "lernu" dictionary for the kindle would be great)
im having the same troubles except im using the ipad, i don't like amazon nor google translate.
I'd say the only way really to improve the dictionary would be to just wait it out or message the people who made it and politely tell them there the dictionary sucks. as for anytype of dictionary or translator i'd wish that they'd make an app that is accurate in translating sentences instead of just word by word,

Interretano (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-02 17:02:21

Sjdusa:
I'd say the only way really to improve the dictionary would be to just wait it out or message the people who made it and politely tell them there the dictionary sucks. as for anytype of dictionary or translator i'd wish that they'd make an app that is accurate in translating sentences instead of just word by word,
yeah, imean, dont u just hate it when they spend their time making a dictionary that doesn't even work?. they could at least say

...By the way, were you (chrisim101010) referring to http://consultazioneeinformazione.blogspot.ca/2012... ?

chrisim101010 (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-03 05:50:39

Interretano:

...By the way, were you (chrisim101010) referring to http://consultazioneeinformazione.blogspot.ca/2012... ?
Thats the one. The amazon site is here

I have played around with dictionaries on Android and found some of them are not useful for the same reasons. So i am not surprised to hear that kindle dictionaries don't work well.

pdenisowski (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-14 01:42:33

chrisim101010:I tried to find an Esperanto electronic dictionary that will work with the kindle system.
ESPDIC is available in the .mobi format :

http://www.denisowski.org/Esperanto/Esperanto.html

It's not a "translation" dictionary like some of the commercially available dictionaries at Amazon (i.e. one that looks up words, including inflected forms, when you position the cursor near them).

I don't believe the "translation" dictionaries don't work on the Kindle Fire (which is basically an Android tablet running the Kindle App, not a HW-based Kindle).

Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but I have to give ESPDIC a plug whenever I can ridulo.gif

Amike,

Paul

chrisim101010 (Montri la profilon) 2012-majo-16 11:06:07

pdenisowski:
chrisim101010:I tried to find an Esperanto electronic dictionary that will work with the kindle system.
ESPDIC is available in the .mobi format :

http://www.denisowski.org/Esperanto/Esperanto.html
It looks good so far.
I tried the Amazon one anyway, and i can not make it work on a kindle touch.

chrisim101010 (Montri la profilon) 2012-junio-08 05:31:41

I recently investigated this issue more in depth. I purchased the english/esperanto dictionary in kindle. It works only when the language of the dictionary and the language of the book are set to the same. The annoying thing is, the kindle does not recognise the international code for esperanto. As i will never read anything in German, i changed the language of my dictionary and esperanto books (done in Calibre) to German. This way, the kindle does not get mixed up with english words (the writer of the dictionary suggests to set the dictionary and books to english. problem is, some esperanto words point to english dictionarys and vice versa).

As for the quality of the dictionary, the system does alright with nouns, pronouns, adjectives and the "classless" words (for lack of a better word). It will also ignore the 'N' and the 'j' endings Unfortunately, it will only recognize infinitives, and is incapable of breaking up formed words. I tried to create my own 10 word dictionary to experiment with it, and it appears the kindle system is just a look up table. There appears to be almost no intelligence to separate words. Fortunately, it can support a table with 800,000 words in it.

So it appears that an effective Kindle/Esperanto dictionary would need all word forms with all endings available, compiled into a large lookup table. (I am not sure how to get the system to ignore the n and j when required, but it can somehow be done)

Has anybody compiled such a dictionary table before? I am not sure how the online dictionarys work, but they appear to have smarts in them, so may not have the appropriate table
The alternative is to build a new table, however that would no doubt need many hours of work to compile.

Any thaughts?

xdzt (Montri la profilon) 2012-junio-08 15:58:52

Hi, chrisim101010. I've also looked into this problem and came to the same conclusion you did regarding there needing to be table entries for every combination. However, I recently came across some pages on "inflections" which I think are how ignoring -j or -n is accomplished. I wonder how flexible this system is and whether it could be adapted to the broader set of possible endings and even affixes.

Two links I came across with useful information (Forgive me if you already saw these):

this thread

[url= http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/article.asp?basefolder=prcgen&file=indexing.htm#deux.2]and this page[/url]

If I have time, I'll experiment some with these inflections this weekend to see what can be done.

If it turns out these inflections aren't flexible enough, a new table could conceivably be constructed fairly trivially with some scripting. Certainly something as simple as adding all verb endings would be easy enough to do in python or similar. Probably take some time to work through the entirety of the seed dictionary file, but computer hours != man hours.

chrisim101010:As for the quality of the dictionary, the system does alright with nouns, pronouns, adjectives and the "classless" words (for lack of a better word). It will also ignore the 'N' and the 'j' endings Unfortunately, it will only recognize infinitives, and is incapable of breaking up formed words. I tried to create my own 10 word dictionary to experiment with it, and it appears the kindle system is just a look up table. There appears to be almost no intelligence to separate words. Fortunately, it can support a table with 800,000 words in it.

So it appears that an effective Kindle/Esperanto dictionary would need all word forms with all endings available, compiled into a large lookup table. (I am not sure how to get the system to ignore the n and j when required, but it can somehow be done)

Has anybody compiled such a dictionary table before? I am not sure how the online dictionarys work, but they appear to have smarts in them, so may not have the appropriate table
The alternative is to build a new table, however that would no doubt need many hours of work to compile.

chrisim101010 (Montri la profilon) 2012-junio-08 16:45:31

I just found the Mobipocket eBook Creator. I played around with the inflections with all variants of 'esti'; the system works! The system can import an external file to build the database, so a script would probably work,(i wouldn't know how to begin writing that). I believe we would still need separate entries for all the different endings though.

The kindle will also access the other dictionaries if the primary dictionary does not have the word, so a set of dictionaries can be created for more advanced words if required.

xdzt:Hi, chrisim101010. I've also looked into this problem and came to the same conclusion you did regarding there needing to be table entries for every combination. However, I recently came across some pages on "inflections" which I think are how ignoring -j or -n is accomplished. I wonder how flexible this system is and whether it could be adapted to the broader set of possible endings and even affixes.

Two links I came across with useful information (Forgive me if you already saw these):

this thread

[url= http://www.mobipocket.com/dev/article.asp?basefolder=prcgen&file=indexing.htm#deux.2]and this page[/url]

If I have time, I'll experiment some with these inflections this weekend to see what can be done.

xdzt (Montri la profilon) 2012-junio-08 17:13:21

That's great news!
The Creator software uses a powerful algorithm to build the inflection index which allows to dramatically reduce the size required for the index : inflections are not stored as entries in the index, but are deduced from a set of rules, which are automatically generated based on the inflected forms contained in the publication. This applies to any language.
I haven't played with the software yet, but I wonder how complex these generated rules are. For example, if you had one entry for say, esti, with inflections for -is, -as, and -os. And a second entry, klini, without explicity inflections, will the generated rules automatically point to klini when you search klinas?

chrisim101010:I just found the Mobipocket eBook Creator. I played around with the inflections with all variants of 'esti'; the system works! The system can import an external file to build the database, so a script would probably work,(i wouldn't know how to begin writing that). I believe we would still need separate entries for all the different endings though.

The kindle will also access the other dictionaries if the primary dictionary does not have the word, so a set of dictionaries can be created for more advanced words if required.

Reen al la supro