Dictionary maker 2.16 beta release

Thomas Fogwill — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:37:41 -0000

New Features:
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- A totally new version of the manual has been created, together with a tutorial document.

Bug fixes:
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- The cursor behaves more consistently and returns to the correct place.
- Ambiguous words' pronunciations are displayed correctly.
- Auto and Incremental modes removed until Incremental mode can be fixed.
- File > Close menu option works correctly now.
- Phonemes with number and special characters load correctly.
- Already classified words are no longer displayed to the user.
- Changed pronunciations can be saved when the same category button is clicked. It used to be only saved if a different category was clicked.

Known issues:
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- The cursor currently disappears after entering a phoneme, and re-appears when the mouse is moved again or when an arrow key is pressed.
- The cursor behaviour can be improved further to behave like word-processing cursor..
- The Expanded Phoneme Panel sort order still needs to be alphabetised and resized, and the Word list display needs to track the currently displayed word correctly.
- When editing the word list, the edited word is added instead, and the original word is not removed.
- Dictionary Importing needs to be made more tolerant of faulty input files.
- Sound playback can be improved so that predictions are always sounded fully without sound file stuttering, and sound does not play before the actual pronunciation is displayed.
- When projects are closed the wrong log file is used for the next project opened. If Dictionarymaker is exited and restarted the log files work correctly.
- Export to semi-colon delimited file currently generates an empty file and needs to be fixed.

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2.15 beta release history:

Bug fixes:
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- The view statistics dialogue now functions correctly.

New features:
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- Words are now marked as belonging to the following categories: Correct, Proper noun, Partial, Foreign, Invalid
- Pronunciation is now captured for words that are correct, foreign and proper nouns.
- Only correct words are now used to generate G2P rules.

Dictionary Maker 2.15 alpha release history

Thomas Fogwill — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:31:20 -0000

Bug fixes:
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- The rule extraction dialogue only appears as long as necessary, and not longer.
- The phoneme mapping tool now supports the use of numbers in phonemes. Before the use of this character would result in the mapping tool failing to import the dictionary.
- If an unknown phoneme is encountered, it is added into the 'New' category with 'bing.wav' as its default sound.
- If phonemes are edited, the expanded phoneme panel now reflects changes in name and category made.

New features:
-------------------
- To reduce the number of mouse gestured needed to enter or change phonemes, the position-indicating colour-bar was changed
to a cursor that responds appropriately to L and R arrows and backspace.
- In the expanded phoneme panel, the context menu was eliminated; a right click now adds a phoneme at the cursor position,
and a left click now plays the associated sound-file.

Dictionary Maker 2.14 released

Thomas Fogwill — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:27:20 -0000

DictionaryMaker is a graphical tool for creating electronic pronunciation dictionaries (for natural languages). The system allows a user to develop a pronunciation dictionary without requiring expert linguistic knowledge or programming expertise.

Bug fix:
-------------
The phoneme mapping tool now supports the use of the back-slash character (/) in phonemes. Before the use of this character would result in the mapping tool failing to export the dictionary.

New features
---------------
An option is now available to export files (dictonaries, rules, graphemes, phonemes and word lists) using different encodings (UTF-8 and default encoding)

Dictionary Maker 2.13 Released

Thomas Fogwill — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 09:20:58 -0000

Severe Bug fix
----------------------

Word pronunciations (phonemes) containing numbers were not loaded when opening the project, this resulted in a
reduced total word figure. Word pronunciations containing numbers are now supported.

Dictionary Maker 2.12 Released

Thomas Fogwill — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:15:16 -0000

New Features
--------------------------

Enhancements have been made to the phoneme mapping tool used when exporting dictionaries.
The user can now create the following types of mappings:
one to many, e.g. ao; A O
many to one, e.g. a o; AO

Dictionary Maker 2.11 Released

Thomas Fogwill — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 09:22:30 -0000

Bug fixes
-----------------------

The default update mode has been changed to the auto update mode.

The information written to the log file has been reduced to only contain critical information. This was done to limit the size of the log file
after working on a large project.

The word filter now works properly. Previously it would filter words without considering the latest character entered by the user.

Saving system default settings no longer results in an false error message.

The rules are now displayed in the correct order when viewing a projects statistics.

Only one rule extraction is now performed after importing a dictionary into a current project.

The incremental rule extraction option can no longer be selected in system preferences. The reason for this is that the incremental update mode
wasn't implemented correctly.

New Features
--------------------------

Possible error words can now be viewed in the word status window.

It is now possible to export a dictionary into HTK, Festival and semi-colon delimited formats.

Phoneme mapping is now supported when exporting a dictionary.

Dictionary Maker 2.1 released

Thomas Fogwill — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:15:14 -0000

Bug fixes
-----------------------

New rules are now extracted when importing a Dictionary during project creation, or during a session via the menu option.

The current batch size when in batch mode now only increments if a words pronunciation is changed. Before it would increment
when a word was verified as correct with the predicted pronunciation, but no new rules would be added in this case.

A rule extraction message dialog box is now shown when ever rules are extracted.

When importing a dictionary during a session via the menu option, the correct words are no longer lost, but are imported.

When exporting rules via the menu option, the system no longer prompts the user with the same dialog again after exporting has
completed.

When exporting rules the rules are now in the correct order.

Audio support no longer crashes when creating a new project.

Audio playback after pressing the verification buttons or play button no longer results in runaway threads that slowed performance down.

Audio resources are now allocated more efficiently. System memory is no longer drained every time audio playback occurs. Before the audio playback would drain system memory to such a point that the system would crash.

Audio button state (Play or Stop) is now changed using Java Events. Before a thread was used to change the status of the button.

The user can no longer verify a word during audio playback. The verification buttons are now activated and deactivated according to whether playback is occurring or not.