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Release Notes 1.0
The open-source Dubsar Dictionary Project uses Ruby on Rails(R), PostgreSQL, jQuery and jQuery UI to provide a simple yet dynamic interface to the Princeton University WordNet(R) data set, containing more than 150,000 English words and proper nouns. Users can browse or search using PostgreSQL wild cards and view word inflections, definitions and synonyms. A draggable custom tooltip displays extensive metadata for each listed word sense, including lexical classifications, syntactic adjective markers, frequency counts from a reference text, generic verb frames, sample sentences and a broad array of pointers to words related in different ways to a given sense. The site also features a hosted QUnit integration test suite.
November 14, 2010
Version 1.0 of the Dubsar Dictionary Project is the initial release. The software is deployed at http://dubsar-dictionary.com.
See Functionality, Features and Content for a full list of current Dubsar features.
The following new features are available in this release, grouped by content features, functionality features and view features.
In Release 1.0, a user can:
- View a word's definitions and part of speech In the active accordion pane for each word, all available definitions are displayed. An abbreviation for the part of speech is displayed in the accordion header (adj., adv., n. or v.). If a word may be used as multiple parts of speech (e.g., run as both a noun and a verb), two entries will be made. Each Dubsar dictionary entry has a single part of speech.
- View a word's synonyms All available synonyms for a word are listed with its definitions.
- See inflected forms for words Dubsar takes irregular inflected forms from WordNet(R) and computes regular inflections for nouns (using the ActiveSupport Inflector) and verbs (using morphological rules).
- See the frequency count for each sense of a word These are now visible by mousing over each sense in a definition pane.
- See the lexical file associated with each synset WordNet(R) associates a tag like <noun.food> or <verb.cognition> with every synset.
- See verb frames among tooltip metadata Available verb frames are listed on the tooltip.
- View lexical and semantic pointer data These are now listed in the tooltip.
- See a list of frequently asked questions There is now an FAQ accordion.
- View adjective markers Adjective markers (p), (a) and (ip) are now visible in the tooltip header for adjective senses that have them.
- Read news about the site in the index view A "News (n.)" accordion pane has been added.
- Take a tour of the application Dubsar now has a /tour path, accessible from the index view.
- See a list of QUnit tests in a browser Visit http://dubsar-dictionary.com/qunit
- Browse entries by first letter Via links in the navigation bar, you can retrieve a list of all words beginning with that letter.
- Search for a word Type a word into the text box and press return or click the search button. There is also a toggle button (like a check box) to match case. SQL wild cards may be used at any position, e.g. %one% will search for all words containing one, and c_t matches both cat and cot.
- Include extra white space in a request The application strips all leading and trailing white space in a request and compresses multiple internal white space characters to a single space.
- Search words by inflection Any search that does not contain a wild card is referred to the inflections table. Wild card searches are referred to the words table.
- See suggestions for search terms in an autocompleter The autocompleter shows available matches while a user is typing. It honors the match case selection, only suggesting case-sensitive matches when the button is selected.
- See most popular words at the top of the autocompleter Now the autocompleter sorts words by hit count.
- See top autocompleter results only The autocompleter now only shows the top ten matches by frequency count.
- Follow links to tooltip pointers The custom tooltip now anchors itself when the user stops moving the mouse for two seconds, giving you an opportunity to follow links on the tooltip.
- Choose between two canned jQuery themes using a pair of radio buttons The application uses a cookie to store the selected theme.
- See flash-based error messages The application redirects to the previous page (if internal) or the index with a reasonable error message in case of exception.
- Scroll through search results without losing the page header or footer A framelike fixed-position display allows a user to scroll the results.
- See a "working..." message when a search request is submitted A message is temporarily displayed below the header bar while waiting for the next page to load.
- Get better visual notification when a search is in progress A "working..." message is displayed any time a search request is made to the server for a new page. Whenever the AJAX autocompleter is active, the mouse cursor for the search box and autocompleter menu is changed to a wait cursor for the duration of the request.
- See metadata in a custom tooltip Synset samples have been moved to a custom tooltip with the frequency counts and lexical file names.
See Dubsar's full current list of open issues at https://github.com/jdee/dubsar/issues.
- Invalid inflections These have mostly been cleaned up. The remaining errors primarily involve verbs ending in a short syllable with l or s. The clean-up process continues.
- Missing inflections Some verbs do not list regular past-tense forms because of the presence of an irregular form. This requires review.
- Unresponsive enter key If focus is in the word-input field, some text has been entered, and the autocompleter menu is visible, the enter key produces no result. Press ESC to hide the menu or TAB to transfer focus to the search button instead.
- Unresponsive autocompleter If you type several letters into the word-input field, then backspace, the autocompleter does not always show matching results. Backspace further and type again to work around the problem.
- Tabbing through the search form On some browsers, if focus is in the word-input field (tabindex 2), and you press TAB, focus is not properly transferred to the search button (tabindex 3). This happens in several browsers on OS X.
- Wrong cursor when dragging tooltip In Google Chrome, Safari and OmniWeb, the cursor is incorrectly changed to a text cursor when dragging a tooltip, rather than a move cursor.
- Back: opening the right accordion pane Dubsar's accordions work well when refreshing a page, which happens in particular when a user requests a search returning no results. Dubsar will redirect to the previous screen (if the search was performed using the search form), open the correct accordion pane and position it where it was when that pane was opened. This does not work in the general case of going back to a previous screen.
- Back: getting the display theme right If you navigate from one Dubsar screen to another, change the display theme, then immediately go back, the previous page will be displayed in the previous theme.
See Supported Browsers and Devices for updated information.
Currently, Dubsar works well in the following browsers:
- Firefox 3 on all platforms (Ubuntu, Vista, OS X)
- Google Chrome 6 & 7 on all platforms
- Safari 5 on OS X and Vista
- Camino 2 on OS X
- OmniWeb 5 on OS X
- Internet Explorer 8 on Vista
Dubsar has not been tested with a version of Internet Explorer below 8.
Dubsar works on the following browsers, but with significant styling glitches:
- Opera 10 on all platforms
- Konqueror 4 on Ubuntu Linux
The QUnit test suite currently passes in all listed browsers.
The server has been tested both on Ubuntu and OS X.