Inference Group
.
.




Search :
.
logo

The Dasher concept works with almost any language. Several European languages and Japanese are currently supported in Dasher. To make use of Dasher with a non-English European language, you need to train Dasher with a text file full of natural writing in your language - put this file in the location input/source or input/source.txt. Make sure the "Word" option is switched off, or else replace the file input/dict with a dictionary for your language.

When version 3 is released, we plan to greatly increase the number of languages handled in Dasher, with the help of the Open Source community. [Version 3 will work in Unicode.] With version 3, as with version 1.6, every language will require a text file full of natural writing (about 300K or more).

More advice about how to create a training set


JDasher

daishoya - JDasher - Japanese Dasher - DAISHOYA

The Japanese name for Dasher is Daishoya (daishoya), which means `scribe'.

Demonstration
A movie describing Daishoya in Japanese.
howareyouH

As a first step towards a full Japanese version of Dasher handling both Kana and Kanji, David Ward has written a Hiragana version, available in version 1.6.3 of Dasher. (NB: later versions of windows-Dasher, such as 1.6.8, do not support Hiragana, because of Tcl font problems; the linux version of 1.6.8 works fine in Hiragana.)

The conversion of Dasher to Daishoya is simple: we replace the English alphabet a..z by the Hiragana alphabet, aiueo... (a,i,u,e,o, ka,ki,ku,ke,ko,...); and we replace the English training text by a Hiragana document. [Unfortunately, we have not been able to find a large pure-Hiragana document, so our language model is not as well-trained as we would like.]

Two orderings of the Hiragana alphabet are available (options "japan1" and "japan2"). In "japan2" the diacritical marks (",o) are included as separate characters; in "japan1" they are integrated by including the characters pa,ba, etc. in the alphabet ("pa", "ba").

We would welcome collaborators to help test Daishoya and introduce it to a large population of users.

We also need Hiragana data, in text form, for training the language model.


The Dasher project is supported by the Gatsby Foundation
and by the European Commission in the context of the AEGIS project - open Accessibility Everywhere: Groundwork, Infrastructure, Standards)
David MacKay
Site last modified Fri Oct 1 10:33:22 BST 2010