Elicitation Tool Help Contents

Elicitation Tool Overview

The Elicitation Tool provides a convenient interface for translating sentences and sentence fragments and aligning word/phrase pairs between the source and translated sentences. It also has tools for creating glossaries from aligned texts.

The Elicitation Tool has several text fields in rows with the labels "Context", "Eliciting", "Elicited", "Alignment" and "Comment":

Users add alignments by using the mouse to click on a word in one sentence and then clicking on the corresponding word in the matching sentence. A line with then be added between the two words. Phrases (multiple words) can also be aligned with each other.

Opening a Corpus

On the Elicitation Tool main menu select "File" and then "Open". Proceed to the directory with the corpus file and select the file. The next time the elicitation tool is run, a short cut to the file will appear in the "File" menu. Clicking on this short cut will open the file.

Unless familiar with the corpus file internal format, it is not recommended to edit the corpus file directly, but always use the alignment tool.

Saving a Corpus

On the Elicitation Tool main menu select "File" and then "Save". The corpus will be saved to the same file name that was originally opened.

To save the corpus to a different file name, select "File" and then "Save As". Choose a new file in the window that appears and click "Save".

Aligning Word/Phrase Pairs

To align a pair of words, use the mouse to click on a source or target language word, and then click on the corresponding word in the other language sentence. A line should appear indicating the alignment, the aligned words will be highlighted, and a number pair will be added to the Alignment field. A particular word can participate in multiple alignments if needed.

Find the words that are translations of each or that serve similar grammatical roles. Links can cross each other as much as needed. To add a phrase alignment, i.e. aligning one or more source langauge words with one or more target language words, hold down the Control key while clicking on each of the words. While holding the Control key, you can click on as many "Eliciting" and "Elicited" words as needed. The words need not be next to each other in the sentence. When words on both sides have been selected, click on the "Add Phrase" button.

Note: Once one or more word/phrase alignments have been added for a sentence pair, editing the translation in the "Eliciting" text field will cause a notice to appear asking if you want to delete all current alignments for the sentence pair.

Mouse-less Operation

The Elicitation Tool can also be used without a mouse if desired. Use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to move between the "Eliciting" and "Elicited" fields. Use the left and right arrow keys to move the cursor to a word. Hit the Enter key to select the word. Then move to the other language field, select the matching word, and hit Enter again. A alignment between the two words will be added. To align a phrase, hold down the Control key will hitting the Enter key to select words. When finished selecting words, instead of clicking on the "Add Phrase" button, hit the Alt and Enter keys at the same time. The alignment will be added.

Deleting Alignments

To delete an alignment, click on the source language word and then the target language word, as if you were adding in the link. To delete an alignment between phrases, it is only necessary to click on one of the words in the phrase. It is not necessary to hold the Control key down.

Mouse-less Operation

As when adding an alignment, use the up and down arrow keys to between the "Eliciting" and "Elicited" fields. Use the left and right arrow keys to move the cursor on the desired word. Hit the Enter key. Move to the other sentence field, move the cursor to the matching word in the alignment pair and hit Enter again. The alignment will be deleted.

Navigating Among Sentence Pairs

When finished with translating and aligning a sentence pair, click on the button with the forward arrow ">" to move on to the next sentence pair. To return to the previous sentence pair, click on the button with "<".

The double arrow buttons "<<" and ">>" go to the first and last, respectively, of all the sentence pairs. In between the arrow buttons is a field with the index number of the current sentence pair. To go directly to a specific sentence pair, type in the pair's index number and hit Enter.

Mouse-less Operation

To move to the next sentence pair using only the keyboard, hit the Alt and right arrow keys at the same time. To move back a sentence, hit the Alt and left arrow keys at the same time. To move to the last sentence in the corpus, hold down both the Control and Alt keys down while pressing the right arrow key. To move to the first sentence, hold down both the Control and Alt keys down while pressing the left arrow key.

Alternate Translations

For a sentence with several possible translations, the Elicitation Tool allows to add and align each translation. After completing and aligning the first translation, click on the "Add Alternative Translation" button near the top of the tool. The original sentence will appear again with a blank "Elicited" field for the new translation. The alternate translation will be marked with an "ALT" appearing next to the "Add Alternate Translation" button. The original translation can still be seen by clicking the back button ("<") once. You can now proceed to translate and align the sentence pair again. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary.

To delete an alternate translation, use the arrow buttons to move to the desired alternate translation. From the main menu, click on "Tools" and then "Delete Alternate". Note that this only works on alternate translations. Non-alternate sentence pairs cannot be deleted.

Searching the Corpus

You can also search for what sentence pairs a word is in using the "Tools" menu option and selecting "Search". Type in the word, select the appropriate language to search in and click "Search". A list of sentences with the word will appear. On each line will be the found word, any matching words aligned to that word, and index of the sentence pair where the word was found. Click on a particular line to view that sentence pair with that index.

Viewing and Saving Glossaries

The Elicitation Tool can build a glossary in either translation direction (Source to Target or Target to Source language) with information from the translated and aligned sentences. From the main menu, click on "Tools". The menu will show glossaries for both language directions. Select the desired direction. The glossary window will appear. To save this glossary to a file, click on the "Save" menu option in the glossary window, select a file name to save it to, and click save. The file format will have an entry word/phrase on a line, followed by one or more tab-indented lines with the matching words/phrases in the other language, followed by a blank line.

Starting Input Methods

For many languages, the standard English keyboard is not adequate for inputting words in the language. In some cases it may be possible to take advantage of input methods provided by the operating system. In other cases, input methods can be installed to work directly with Java. Examples of this are the GATE input methods at http://gate.ac.uk/ , the Hindi and Thai input methods at http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/InputMethod/inputmethod.html , and the Chinese input methods at http://www.chinesecomputing.com/programming/java.html

To activate these Java-based input methods when using Microsoft Windows, click on the icon in the upper-left hand corner of the window. From the menu that appears, click on "Select Input Method" and then select the appropriate input method from the list of choices.