Dumb vs. Intelligent Popups
Mar 4th, 2008 by trevelyan
What do people feel about switching the output of the “popup annotation” (the default output from the Adso home page and the popups on newsinchinese.com to a more comprehensive definition (something that includes all of the glosses in the database)? Right now Adso chooses the most likely definition/pos given its understanding of Chinese grammar. I’m not sure that most people notice this selectivity until the system actually gets something wrong….
The reason the system is built this way is that Adso aims to offer gist translation and other sorts of generic semantic analysis functionality. Being able to hone down a word to a single definition is much more useful for search/semantic/translation applications than just showing a list of possible definitions. I strongly believe that structuring data in a way that enables this is important for the ability of the open source community to innovate in the long-term in this space.
But maybe this is the wrong approach for data-display, and especially for a project that aims to make it easy for people to collaborate around language. I’ve noticed that a lot of users (especially new contributors) like to pack multiple definitions into the popup windows rather than add new ones. I usually edit these during the review process, but don’t want people to feel disappointed if their edits “disappear” from one release to the next, especially if they aren’t really gone, but merely restructured. Also, if people really WANT more comprehensive definitions when they use an annotator, it is easy enough to change the system and get Adso to produce that sort of output. It’s actually much faster to do as well since this eliminates the hard work of grammatical disambiguation.
Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this, especially since the next review is coming up fast and it looks as if we’ll have more than a thousand new submissions.
Of course, why not just give the option? And why not make it clearer for newbies how the system works?
I like your approach, for the most part. It’s annoying to see all the possible definitions when the appropriate one is obvious. ChinesePod used to do it that way until you joined. It sucked before.
What about giving an option for alternate definitions? Like if the popup definition is obviously off, what if you could click in something, and the popup would do an AJAX reload, offering multiple definitions? Maybe users could even help the adso engine learn by selecting the appropriate existing definition when mistakes are made by the adso engine.
I too prefer it the way it is now. From my perspective as an elementary learner it just becomes too confusing if I have to select the correct definition from a long list of possibilities. It may be the first time I’m encountering the word and even though the context may offer some clues to the right choice of definition I really don’t have any way to be sure if I’m on the right track. Getting only one possibility helps me to get a feeling for the most commonly used definitions of a word and makes it more obvious to me when something else is chosen instead.
Then it would be useful to do what John suggests and have a closer look at the word to see the different possibilities
Another voice here for “leave it the way it is”, at least by default, although the idea of having a ’see all definitions’ button is a good one.
I like John’s suggestion. Displaying all possible definitions is great functionality to have in certain contexts, but for annotation purposes it’s just distracting and will probably result in a perceived loss of accuracy.
Hmmm….After manually adsotating a bunch of articles of Chinese law I am leaning toward allowing a more comprehensive popup. I find that more than 50% of the time the legal definition in English is somewhat different from what usually passes for common usage. One example is 责任. The usual English meaning is “responsibility”. However, the official English translation released by the Chinese government uses the word “liability”. Responsibility and liability have different legal consequences. So I think it would be better to have the popup show alternative English definitions.