Being a Wordsmith with Wordster
05 November 2009
"Two years ago, my daughter Diya was reading a book and did not know the meaning of a word. I told her to look it up in the dictionary but there were too many meanings and she did not know which one to refer to. This prompted me to think that current dictionaries and thesaurus don't give context. This led me to think why don't I build something that puts context around words."
Assoc Prof Anindya Datta, Department of Information Systems
ONLINE WORDSMITH: Assoc Prof Datta who created Wordster
Have you ever been stuck with choosing the right word to use in a given context? Or maybe you know the description of a word, but the word just does not come to mind? Fret no more as help is at hand with Wordster, an online dictionary created by Assoc Prof Anindya Datta of the NUS School of Computing.
"Wordster is a place where you come to research words and anything lexical that has to do with words," said Assoc Prof Datta. Wordster differs from other online dictionaries in its various unique functions. This include the reverse dictionary function where a user can input the description of a word and Wordster will provide the corresponding word, contextual lookup and alternates which explains a word according to the context of the sentence and offers synonyms respectively.
Those writing reports or articles can benefit from using Wordster too. When a document is uploaded to Wordster, the programme can run a frequency count. When a word is being moused over, the programme shows the number of times and percentage which the word has been used. It also alerts the user that a word has been repeated and underlines it.
"Wordster benefits from the contribution of users as the users can provide videos, images and artwork into the Wordster database. For instance, for the word 'legend', a video of Michael Jackson and submitted it for contribution. The user contributions are attributed accordingly," said Assoc Prof Datta.
For a start, target users of Wordster are middle and high school students. They have been chosen as they interact with words most frequently and they represent a vast potential to reach out to some one billion users globally.
Assoc Prof Datta is optimistic about Wordster. He foresees Wordster being used for Amazon Kindle, where Wordster could be used as Amazon Kindle's dictionary. Amazon Kindle is a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon that allows users to read electronic books.. He added that as the underlying Wordster technology and data have a huge corpus of semantics, Wordster can also be used to provide licensing data such as offering legal document analysis. In addition, Wordster is not limited to English. It can be applicable to any languages that have an English-like grammar such as German, French and Hindi.
The idea of creating Wordster was inspired by Diya, Assoc Prof Datta's daughter. He said: "Two years ago, Diya was reading a book and did not know the meaning of a word. I told her to look it up in the dictionary but there were too many meanings and she did not know which one to refer to. This prompted me to think that current dictionaries and thesaurus don't give context. This led me to think why don't I build something that puts context around words."
From there, Wordster was developed. While Wordster is a start-up company headquartered in the United States, NUS conducts the research aspect of Wordster. "There are two important concepts behind Wordster, namely high performance database system and natural language processing," said Assoc Prof Datta.
"We needed computational linguistic expertise and NUS has some good researchers this field. NUS is also a forward looking university with a focus on entrepreneurship," he noted. He said that Assoc Prof Kan Min-Yen, also from the School of Computing, guided him in the natural language processing aspect. Assoc Prof Datta was also assisted by Master's student Mr. Ryan Shaw and PhD students Mr. Bao Yang and Mr. Fang Fang.
Assoc Prof Datta, who is a computer scientist, was previously a faculty member of the Georgia Institute of Technology, United States. He left the University when the opportunity of working on start-ups came along. It has been 10 years since he has been working on start-ups and he considers himself as a "serial entrepreneur".