Xerox Corporation

Atty T Mullins

Ronald M Kaplan

Robert Shuchatowitz

A computerized multilingual translation dictionary includes a set of word and phrases for each of the languages it contains, plus a mapping that indicates for each word or phrase in one language what the corresponding translations in the other languages are. The set of words and phrases for each language are divided up among corresponding concept groups based on an abstract pivot language. The words and phrases are encoded as token numbers assigned by a word-number mapper laid out in sequence that can be searched fairly rapidly with a simple linear scan. The complex associations of words and phrases to particular pivot language senses are represented by including a list of pivot-language sense numbers with each word or phrase. The preferred coding of these sense numbers is by means of a bit vector for each word, where each bit corresponds to a particular pivot element in the abstract language, and the bit is ON if the given word is a translation of that pivot element. Then, to determine whether a word in language 1 translates to a word in language 2 only requires a bit-wise intersection of their associated bit-vectors. Each word or phrase is prefixed by its bit-vector token number, so the bit-vector tokens do double duty: they also act as separators between the tokens of one phrase and those of another. A pseudo-Huffman compression scheme is used to reduce the size of the token stream. Because of the frequency skew for the bit-vector tokens, this produces a very compact encoding.

Compact encoding of multi-lingual translation dictionaries

A data storage medium stores string data that can be used in character recognition and instructions for accessing the string data. The string data includes data units that can be accessed by a processor in executing the instructions. The processor can use character data indicating characters of a string to access a sequence of the data units that ends with an ending subsequence. The ending subsequence includes acceptance information indicating whether a string whose sequence of data units ends with the ending subsequence is an acceptable string. If so, the ending subsequence also includes category set information indicating a set of categories for strings whose sequences end with the ending subsequence. The categories can include words, numbers, compound words, and so forth. The acceptance information can include a bit in a character label data unit that includes information indicating the character type of an ending character. The acceptance information can also include an acceptance data unit whose value indicates an acceptable string ending. The acceptance data unit can be followed by category data units, each with a value indicating a category. The category data units can be used to obtain a bit vector for a string, each bit of which indicates whether the string is in one of the categories. For compactness, all or part of an ending subsequence can be shared by plural acceptable strings. Looping can be used to represent a category with a potentially infinite number of strings, such as numbers.

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Atty T Mullins