Applications dealing with words (RIA)

2 days ago, there was a panel called "Research in Action" where some 36 UofT graduate students' research projects were put on display for discussing and demonstrating. Although I had a midterm and a quiz the next day, I managed to free some time to visit several booths.

Some of the non-words-related projects I found interesting included:

• a mobile device that allowed the user to know what they were doing on the touch-screen via vibrations so that the user doesn't need to look at the screen to know what he or she is doing
• video browsing by direct manipulation: by selecting and dragging virtually anything on the screen, the user can view the movements that the object and its surroundings follow in the direction of the drag (of course, the direction is limited, as it has to have occurred in the actual video-taping)
• ILoveSketch - a sketching system for creating 3D curve models: while drawing, the user can change the "view angle" of the screen as if they are rotating the paper around

But I really found the following two applications that dealt with word manipulation interesting, probably because I could really see myself using it:

• an application that makes user-submitted review more useful:

Most people who go to sites to read reviews on restaurants, hotels, etc. only bother reading the first few at most, assuming the rest are similar, or only count the number of stars. What this application does is find the most frequently used phrases and present them to the user in an intuitive manner, making the more frequent phrases larger in font, and color-coding good and bad descriptions (green for good, red for bad). The phrases are adjective-noun pairs, and if you click on a phrase, it will show some of the other adjectives that were used with the noun. It also shows you how many users used the word/phrase, as well as how they were used (sentence examples). In this way, the user can see with just one glance what most people said in their reviews.

I asked about how the application chose which phrases occurred most frequently, because I found that some of the phrases were more than just 2 words long. A faculty member involved in the project told me that it first parses the sentences into nouns and adjectives. Then, it picks the most frequent nouns, and compares the adjective before it, to find adjective-noun pairs.

The feature was buggy but the application also allows for temporal comparison of reviews by letting the user choose for the application to search through just the recent reviews or through all the reviews. For example, a restaurant may have improved over time, and there may be an increase of praises in the recent reviews as opposed to all reviews.

I think this would be an incredibly time-saving feature, and it facilitates comparison between reviews of two or more things, because you don't have to read through everything (and nobody has the time to do that, anyway). Or maybe you are looking for particular aspects, and all you have to do is look for the phrase that matches the aspect.

• an application that allows learning of foreign languages with contextual translation:

This is a web-browser (Firefox only for now) based application that promotes learning of foreign languages by replacing certain words from English to the foreign language of choice. At the main screen, the user can choose which language to translate to and what level they are at. This level determines the number of words that are translated in the text on the browser. The way the words are chosen are by how frequent the words occur in the English language as a whole (not just in the text). The idea is that the user can guess what the foreign word is via context clue, and learn the words that way. If the user hovers over the translated word, the English appears, allowing the user to check if he or she is correct.

Right now, the project has been tested mainly for European languages, but the application "works" (perhaps not as accurately) on other languages as well. If we can use this application on any URL, this would be a fun way of learning languages. From what I saw, it won't teach you grammar rules, but the casual user is usually only interested in knowing what words mean. I can definitely see myself using such an application in my spare time!