i can't help but wonder, if anyone else except from me was using it for at least last few weeks? otherwise, it means i had breaking news at hands without realizing it :(
Google Dictionary
51–60 of 72 posts
Re: Google Dictionary
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the off chance, does anyone have recommendations for similar resources in German, French, and/or Spanish?
For translations to/from German from/to (English, Spanish, etc), dict.leo.org is pretty decent. Not sure that's what you're looking for.
Thanks for the recommendation. I've used LEO. However, I was looking for something more comprehensive, (perhaps more authoritative), and also in a more readable format.
Re: Google Dictionary
#53Mac OS X has an excellent dictionary app, highlight any word, and from the app menu select Services -> Look Up in Dictionary. Even works when you're offline :-)
Seems to me this used to be bound to a keyboard shortcut back in the NEXTSTEP OS, though it's possible to add one in the current Mac OS.
Re: Google Dictionary
#54no japanese? curious to know why.
Re: Google Dictionary
#55Mac OS X has an excellent dictionary app, highlight any word, and from the app menu select Services -> Look Up in Dictionary. Even works when you're offline :-) Seems to me this used to be bound to a keyboard shortcut back in the NEXTSTEP OS, though it's possible to add one in the current Mac OS.
Or even better: hold down Ctrl-Cmd-D and hover over any word.
Works in Cocoa apps that use native text controls -- Safari, Mail, etc. all work.
Re: Google Dictionary
#56Good dictionaries are hand-compiled by experienced lexicographers. Not Google's strength, to put it mildly. What Google would be extremely good at is creating corpora for all these languages. An example of an excellent Spanish corpus is the following: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp
Good encyclopedias are compiled by experienced... oh wait. No idea if this specific effort is any good, but Google have done a lot of interesting things with language already.
Good encyclopedias are written by large numbers of individual contributors with expertise in specialized fields, who barely get paid for their efforts, most of the money from encyclopedias going to pay for the organization, compilation, editing, etc. It turns out that the latter can now be much more effectively decentralized than ever before, and contributors no longer need to be explicitly recruited. (which is certainly not to say that Wikipedia isn’t dramatically different from other encyclopedias)
Dictionaries are still compiled by experienced lexicographers.
* * *
Incidentally, does anyone know of a good online thesaurus, now that thesaurus.com is no longer using decent source material (after being hit with a lawsuit for essentially stealing it). All the ones online seem to use Roget’s II, which is vastly inferior to the original Roget’s.
Re: Google Dictionary
#57I tried "the" first, and then "friend".
It looks like it's generated from statistics plus a language model plus the contents of the web (possibly and/or google books).
If that's the goal it looks like they're doing some great work. If being a dictionary is the goal it looks like there are currently better solutions.
However a) give it a few years and b) if they're able to extract that amount of information from their corpus, just imagine how that could be applied to a search engine - I get the feeling that they're showing their hand a little in their progress on the natural language processing front.
If that's so then I can't wait to see them apply it to search.
Re: Google Dictionary
#58no japanese? curious to know why.
日本語わ、むぞかしですね。。。
Re: Google Dictionary
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good encyclopedias are compiled by experienced... oh wait. No idea if this specific effort is any good, but Google have done a lot of interesting things with language already.
Good encyclopedias are written by large numbers of individual contributors with expertise in specialized fields, who barely get paid for their efforts, most of the money from encyclopedias going to pay for the organization, compilation, editing, etc. It turns out that the latter can now be much more effectively decentralized than ever before, and contributors no longer need to be explicitly recruited. (which is certa…
It depends on how we're [re]defining "dictionary." A dictionary has the potential to be a set of pairs of words, and any of the following:
1. how the word is used,
2. what the consensus is on how the word is used,
3. what the consensus is on how we 'should' use the word,
4. what the consensus of people who are, by consensus, considered "experienced lexicographers", is, on how the word is used,
5. and what the consensus of people who are, by consensus, considered "experienced lexicographers," is, on how the word 'should' be used.
Google is trying the first approach, defining words by trying to learn them itself, like a person who naturally "absorbs" a word by hearing it used in the right context enough. The second is how people usually learn words, by asking others what they mean when they hear them. The third is prescriptivism, but ruled by the majority: words such as "ur" 'should' be valid, and so on, in the majority's opinion. The forth is what dictionaries try to contain, and the fifth is what books of "advice" like Strunk and White contain. All are different, though some overlap (as, e.g., 3 may be influenced by 5.)