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User-Aided Disambiguation: a demo

A few weeks ago I made some visual mockups of how Ubiquity could look and act in Japanese. Part of this proposal was what I called “particle identification”: that is, immediate in-line identification of delimiters of arguments, which can be overridden by the user:

The inspiration for this idea came from Aza’s blog post “Solving the ‘it’ problem” which advocates for this type of quick feedback to the user in cases of ambiguity. Such a method would help both the user better understand what is being interpreted by the system, as well as offer an opportunity for the user to correct improper parses. I just tried mocking up such an input box using jQuery.

Try the User-Aided Disambiguation Demo

If you have any bugfixes to submit or want to play around with your own copy, the demo code is up on BitBucket. ^^ Let me know what you think!

Related posts:

  1. Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation Demo
  2. This week on Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation
  3. Scoring and Ranking Suggestions
  4. How natural should a natural interface be?
  5. Ubiquity in Firefox: Focus on Japanese

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6 Responses to “User-Aided Disambiguation: a demo”

  1. mitcho Says:

    Known issues: - the "adjust input widths" algorithm needs some help… perhaps there is a much better approach. - it will pick out particles from "unconverted" Japanese text with a Japanese IME (before the user has made a selection). This could be fixed if there was a way via JavaScript to check whether the user is currently typing in an IME context or not. - does not wrap or extend horizontally well

  2. Blair McBride Says:

    Impressive work! A few thoughts:

    • Its broken if Firebug isn't installed & enabled, due to unconditional use of window.console
    • I get caught up trying to hit escape after pressing space, after having typed in a delimiter
  3. mitcho Says:

    Ah, yes, I left some debug code in there. :) I just cleared that up right now. As for the second point—that's interesting. Perhaps we can allow escaping even after some whitespace has been entered… ?

  4. A_Flama Says:

    Very nice! Keep the good work :)

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  6. Research writing Says:

    The inspiration for this idea came from Aza’s blog post “Solving the ‘it’ problem” which advocates for this type of quick feedback to the user in cases of ambiguity. It is true, I have just read this article.


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