Naidheachdan - News

Index
2013 January February March April May June July August September October November December
2012 January February March April May June July August September October November December
2011 January February March April May June July August September October November December
2010 January February March April May June July August September October November December
2009 April May June July August September October November December

April 2013
Under the 'hood
2012 was a pretty horrendous year in terms of workload, both for Will and me so apart from adding steadily to the dictionary (there are now just over 50,000 entries - entry 50,000 having been dìthean-caorach), there hasn't been a huge amount of stuff apart from the predictive texting and the maps. Ok, so maybe not so minor. Anyway, we're getting back into the swing and fixed some under-the-hood stuff that won't affect you as dictionary users on the whole but that will make life easier for the editor. One visible change is that the sound player now only appears when there actually is a sound file (that had been annoying many people, sorry about that).

We've got plans for a lot of stuff, like better fuzzy searches (the current system is just too Anglo-centric), an RSS feed, maybe a tooltip dictionary tool... we'll see, time and work permitting!

Minor Update: We're now also showing negative votes, that is, words where a votes has stated that they do not know a word in question. There aren't anywhere near as many of them as there are positive votes but it can still be useful to see that a word is not used by people or in a certain are. In the word druid for example.

November 2012
Guess what? Yup, we've used and abused the Faclair Beag again, this time to create a predictive texting tool for Gaelic. In a way it's a totally logical step and in a way slightly left-field so let me expand a little on the convoluted history.

There are two main strands to this. Anyone who has ever tried to text in Gaelic knows what a chore it is to do it letter by letter. It's slow at best, even slower if you're dìcheallach and try to put in the accents. And rather frustrating because, depending on your phone, the system will keep trying to "correct" your Gaelic to English so if you're now careful, tha very easily becomes the. So given the enduring popularity of texting, a language in a technologised country today cannot really afford not to have predictive texting. You'd think so, wouldn't you? Seems like arts projects are SO much more popular when it comes to funding... but anyway. So I've always kept an eye open for an opportunity.

One thing I did not want to do is fall into the trap that the Irish did some years ago with Téacs. It was a good idea in the sense that predictive texting was needed for Irish. But the mistake was to go with a custom built solution. Doing something like this means two things: 1) You tie yourself to a development process to ensure that new phones are properly supported, bugs are fixed and new features (if needed) developed and 2) You tie the end-user to your specific tool.

Is that so bad? Yes and no. The problem with Téacs was that it only offered Irish. A bit duh because we all know that one thing bilingual people do is switch between languages a lot. So what about English? And the second problem was that they didn't maintain the program properly which meant that it very soon became very out-of-date. So their list of supported phones in 2012 looks rather embarrassing.

So I knew that if this was going to work long-term, it would most likely mean joining a bigger project which was open to new languages. And in July last year my periodid trawling of the web for such a project finally threw up a result - a project called Adaptxt which had just gone Open Source.

This is where the other strand of the story comes in. At the most basic level, predictive texting just relies on a wordlist but many such tools, including Adaptxt, are much smarter than that and try to rank words according to how common they are (so you're not offered interregnum when you're looking to type internet). And in the case of Adaptxt, they also try to get smart about predicting the next word you're likely to type. In the case of Gaelic this means that if you type Bha, you're offered mi as a likely next word. Sure, Adaptxt is capable of learning but who wants to train their phone from scratch every time they buy a new one?

Back in 2009 I was in Dublin on a research trip courtesy of Bòrd na Gàidhlig to look into speech and language technology for Gaelic. It just so happened that a guy called Kevin Scannell (who is a professor of computing at the University of St Louis and into Irish and Irish software big time) was in town and we met up in the Club Chonradh na Gaeilge (highly recommended!). The evening's a bit of a blur but I walked away with loads of notes on things like "lexical databases" and "web crawlers" and whatnot. Shortly thereafter, Kevin successfully reeled me into the Firefox translation project and stuff just snowballed from there in terms of Gaelic software translation. Another spinoff was the Faclair Beag itself. Not so much the idea of it but how we did it. So instead of just doing a really primitive "list" based dictionary (e.g. with cù on one side and dog on the other), we got kinky and took onboard much of what Kevin had extolled. As a result, the Faclair Beag not only knows that cù = dog but also that cù is the nominative singular of a masculine noun, that chù is the lenited form, that coin is the genitive singular of a masculine noun... and so on. This means it's not only real smart when it comes to finding the right word if you put on something else that the citation form (i.e. if you put in conaibh instead of cù for example) but it also allows us to build lots of sexy stuff on the back of it.

Because marrying this with Adaptxt was beyond my ken of the sgoil-dhubh of programming, I got in touch with Kevin and asked if he'd be up for doing a joint project to create state of the art predictive texting for Irish and Scottish Gaelic - which he was! And in the spirit of Goidelic brotherhood, we also decided to do Manx Gaelic at the same time. So we took the Gaelic data from the Faclair Beag, Kevin then ranked each word using a massive text corpus he has (so for example, conaibh is out, but tha is right there at the top) and sent me that data. I then invested a certain amount of sweat, coffee and patience and to cut this long story short, here we are. So, interested? You can just search for "Adaptxt" in Google Play (the installation isn't hard) but if you want a step by step illustrated guide, here's one here I did earlier. An dòchas gun còrd e ribh!

October 2012
DRINK ME, EAT ME!
The Faclair has gone Lewis Carroll. All entries have been replaced with white rabbits. Nah, don't panic. Will has improved the use of the screen size by making the column width adjust to the size of your screen and/or window. So if you're on a tiny 11" monitor you probably won't see that much difference but say you're on a massive 70" monster, you'll find that most entries will display over three lines max, saving you a lot of vertical scrolling:

Alternatively, it also works if you resize your browser window, for example if you want to have it side by side with a text document you're working on. Like this for example:

Enjoy - and keep the ideas coming!


April 2012
Maps, glorious maps
For all those who have been wondering about why we're collecting all these votes, there's finally an answer! They feed our map tool. Like traditional dialect maps, these give you an indication of where words are used. Like these two (one of my all-time favourites):

 
Not all of them are quite that detailed yet but we're working on it!

So how do you view the maps? Easy, just search for a word and click on the blue underlined word, for example in the above case, feum and mand. The map will come up and display any votes and also a link to the Help page for the maps (which has more detailed info). Oh, and while most votes are in Scotland, there are some cropping up abroad, especially in Nova Scotia!

Mobile Version
There's now also a mobile version of the Faclair at www.faclair.com/m - same as the desktop version really but we've collapsed the Advanced Search feature and used a smaller logo to save space on screen. It's specifically for mobile phones but if you're on a slow connection, there's no reason why you couldn't use it on a desktop too but note that if you're a user with voting rights, you can't get that feature in the mobile version.

You can also put a link on your mobile phone's desktop now to get to it real quick. You need to do the following:
1) Android Phones
    a) Bookmark the page in the phone's default browser
    b) Go to your Bookmarks and press and hold and when the options come up, tell it to Add shortcut to Home. That's it.
   
2) iPhones
    a) Go to the page and tap the Bookmark icon on screen.
    b) When the menu comes up, press Add to Home Screen. That's it.
 


2011 September
A Gaelic Scrabble
Before you ask what Scrabble has to do with the Faclair - it's yet another one of those interesting uses you can put a database of words to. With a bit of tidying up (to remove names and other proper nouns), it's not that hard to build a dictionary file for something like Scrabble. Want to have a go?


2011 June
Am Faclair Beag on LearnGaelic
Well, who would have thought that? After lots of meetings and more draft documents flitting backwards and forwards through cyberspace, MG Alba have bought, that's right, bought, a license to use our dictionary data on their new LearnGaelic website.

Though Tahiti is still not an option, this is certainly a welcome development indeed!


2011 January
Check your spelling, sir?
One of the first spin-offs we've been working on is a selection of Gaelic spellcheckers. There's a couple out there already but, well, let's just say they're not being maintained well.

So, by using the database in the Faclair, we've been able to join up with an Open Source project called Hunspell and script druid called Kevin Scannell to create spellchecking tools which will work in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, Opera and LibreOffice/OpenOffice. If you're using the Gaelic version of Firefox/Thunderbird and LibreOffice, the spellcheckers already come bundled with the software but if you're using the English version, you can get the Mozilla spellchecker here and the LibreOffice one here (also works in OpenOffice).

By co-operating with other projects in this way, we can ensure that both the software and the spellchecking dictionary will be maintained properly and regulary, which means:

Oh and they're all free of charge!


2010 August
The Faclair at Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig in Aberdeen
We kind of left it a bit late registering but ended up doing a paper nonetheless. Well.. I say paper. It was mostly a presentation really on the timeline of our two dictionaries, starting with the digitisation of Dwelly's, the birth of the Faclair Beag and the planned spin-off projects, such as spellcheckers and predictive texting and so on. Perhaps not high-brow academic as such but I feel it was a worthwhile paper nonetheless because it shows what you can do with a properly built lexical database - even a relatively simple one.

It was well received and one of the member of the audience made me laugh, he came up to me and said "Don't take this the wrong way - but only a German could have done this". He then explained that it was the clear sense of direction of the dictionary project, its execution and logical progression which had prompted him to make this amusing compliment. Ach well, the Gàidheileamailtich score again :)

If you want to see the presentation (it's in Gaelic), you can get the PDF here.


2009 April
A dictionary is born!
We always said that Dwelly-d would be just the start and so, mar a chanas iad, 's e gnìomh a dhearbhas - here you are. It's called the Faclair Beag because, well, it's kinda small still even though we have big plans for it. So bear with us for now if you find gaps - but other than that, we hope you find it useful in using or learning Gaelic!