Hello,

For help in building my English (and Spanish) vocabulary I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to keep track of words that I lookup online. For example, something like the many dictionary add-ons for web browsers with an additional feature that keeps tracks of words you look up. Even better if it can then give you quizzes/flashcards on words you have looked up.

I'm considering building something like this, but don't want to reinvent the wheel. Thanks for any help.

-aaron

I am not sure, Aaron, but welcome!

While it doesn't help you keep track of words you look up, have you seen the freerice site? It's fun, a great way to relax and to learn at the same time.

Thanks - the site is indeed fun.

I find I need to see a word in context a few times before I am able to actually use the word competently as opposed to just understanding it. I'm working on a tool that records words you look up, along with their context, and helps you find the words in use elsewhere. That's a core feature, anyway.

If you have any ideas, please pass them along!

best wishes
-aaron

p.s. i'll keep donating rice in my free time

Things you might want to be aware of, which you may be able to leverage in developing an application: (1) WordNet (link), (2) Semantic Web (link), and (3) Annotea (link). One of the first applications of computers in the humanities was in the creation of KWIC (key word in context) concordances. You might also benefit from looking into (1) information retrieval, which was a key field in library sciences (and humorously poked fun at in the movie Brazil) and (2) part-of-speech tagging (link) and other corpus-based NLP (natural language processing) topics. Also, data structures such as associative arrays, tries, and suffix arrays come to mind at the lower levels. Much work has been done on string searching algorithms, too. You can google around and find papers on many of these topics with references to other works which may require a trip to the local university library. Also, there are many software libraries out there. You might try searching on Sourceforge (link) to see if there are any open source applications/libraries which you can leverage.

Thank you, zmježd. I had found some of these, but not others such as Annotea. I am thinking that I will probably leave NLP and semantic evaluation out of it initially. My first impression is that the best way to gather *good* examples is to draw on data/examples provided by the user community rather than having a bot find examples. Of course, I'll need a critical mass of users for that to work out.

Anyway, thank you for the helpful links. I like your sig.

-aaron