A method extracts all "short" ambiguity from an input FST (i.e., ambiguities of one arc in length). The method factors the input FST into a first factor and a second factor such that the second factor contains all ambiguity that is one arc long, and the first factor contains all other parts of the input FST. The method a priori prevents the creation of some redundant intermediate symbols.

A reading machine includes computer program residing on a computer readable medium operable with an operating system that permits the production of windows on a display. The program has instructions for causing a computer to provide a first user selected call a first user selected routine in response to a user selecting a first word that the user seeks assistance in understanding and produce a text file for the first selected word comprised of data that assists the user call. An operating system routine commands the operating system to create a new window on the display and fill the new window on the display with the information contained in the text file. A second user selected call to a user selected routine can be provided for word that the user seeks assistance in understanding to provide a recursive enrichment feature.

In a semantic feature dictionary, names of semantic features and character strings in a first language having the semantic features are stored in a mutually associated manner. In a bilingual database, information on various conversational sentence examples is stored. Information on each conversational sentence example includes a conversational sentence example in the first language, a translation in a second language of the conversational sentence example, and a string of semantic features contained in the conversational sentence example. An analyzer extracts semantic feature names from an input sentence, free entered through an input unit, by using the semantic feature dictionary. A semantic searcher selects from the bilingual database a conversational sentence example having the largest number of semantic feature names coincident with the extracted semantic feature names. A display unit displays the selected conversational sentence example along with its translation.

A terminology extraction system which allows for automatic creation of bilingual terminology has a source text which comprises at least one sequence of source terms, aligned with a target text which also comprises at least one sequence of target terms. A term extractor builds a network from each source and target sequence wherein each node of the network comprises at least one term and such that each combination of source terms is included within one source node and each combination of target terms is included within one target node. The term extractor links each source node with each target node, and through a flow optimization method selects relevant links in the resulting network. Once the term extractor has been run on the entire set of aligned sequences, a term statistics circuit computes an association score for each pair of linked source/target terms, and finally the scored pairs of linked source/target term that are considered relevant bilingual terms are stored in a bilingual terminology database. The whole process can be iterated in order to improve the strength of the bilingual links.

P++ software that provides a Prolog language data storing and processing method, includes making a plurality of different application programs, introduces two structure types into arguments of clauses, implements these two structure types in predicate inputting, memory storing, processing through unification and back tracking, and outputting for each query. The first structure type is hierarchically defined and recursively processed. Its member can be a variable, a data term, or of any other structure type except itself. Its variable child member can be substituted by one of this structure type making a result in the same structure type with different length. The second structure type is recursively defined and processed. Its member can be a variable, a data term, or of any structure type including itself. It has fixed number of members. With these two structure types, addition and multiplication are extended to multi-dimensional space operations.