WeSay Development Progress

WeSay now lets the user edit the semantic domains of a sense from the Dictionary Browse and Edit tab, as an alternative to gathering words using the Gather By Semantic Domain task.

To see how this works, let’s add some of the domains that would apply to a Papua New Guinean bilum. 

To look for a domain, we click in a box and start typing. First, we start typing "crafts" and see a domain matching that word:

Next, since bilums are used to transport firewood, we type that in.  A promising domain appears, fuel.  But is that right? We don’t want to say that bilums are something you burn.  Happily, when we point to the word Fuel, WeSay displays a description confirming that domain is also for things you use in collecting fuel.

Finally, since at least one of my kids has slept in a bilum, we should find a domain for that.  Here we’ll pretend we know the domain number, and just start typing that until we see Bed:

I had fun finding domains for a few words. I hope you do too.

It’s been awhile since we’ve posted but that does not mean we haven’t been active. I’ve added a new task to collect words by semantic domains. There is substantial evidence that we organize words in our minds in a network of relationships. Words tend to cluster in groups that we call semantic domains. People can rapidly jump from word to word along the mental pathways within a semantic domain. If you ask someone to think of words that describe the surface of water, they can quickly give you a number of words such as “turbulent”, “rippled”, “calm”, “still”, “rough”, “choppy”, and “glassy”.

Thinking of words by semantic domains is used to jump start the dictionary creation process. For each domain, a set of elicitation questions prompt users to think of the words that belong to that domain. For instance, the domain “Fish with net” contains the questions,

• What words refer to fishing with a net?
• What equipment is used to fish with a net?
• What words refer to the fish that are caught?

When the user enters a word, it is inserted into the dictionary and automatically classified by that domain.

The semantic domain task can use any template of semantic domains and questions but WeSay ships with the semantic domain template from Ron Moe’s Dictionary Development Process.