Permettez-moi, s’ils vous plait, ecrire quelques mots en anglais.

After 12 years of R&D, almost all funded with personal savings, borrowing one’s own inheritance, and that of one’s own children, all to retain an engineer to write this syntactic parsing code, I can assure you this has not been a “get rich quick scheme.”

I was helped, finally, after 6 years, by a grant from the United States Department of Education, which enabled me to conduct a very broad, year-long validation study in over 500 students ages 12 through 17, with the study itself being conducted under the supervision of a leading university here. Another researcher, Charles Vogel, PhD, has also received a doctoral degree based on evaluation of this method to improve reading.

The real work of the parsing engine is, as has been noted by some of the commentators, on a syntactic level. To the extent that some of the work of reading is syntactic interpretation, and to the extent that providing cues to syntactic structure might aid readers and enable them to then apply their cognitive resources to higher-order tasks in understanding and remembering the text, and to the extent, finally, that our parsing engines are indeed able to extract and represent such syntactic structure with a fair amount of accuracy – then, this method should help some readers, with many of the texts they read.

It is not meant to replace all text. The software is simply a tool – which readers use when and if they feel it would help them. The parsing engine operates on any digital text (in English) and converts the text in real time, on-demand.

There are indeed, many issues on how to integrate this new format with other elements of a document. For example, we alternate color background to denote changes in paragraph. Some of the newer methods that facilitate orientation and navigation through electronic documents in general (such as drop down menus, and point-&-click table of contents) are especially helpful for reading longer documents formatted in Live Ink. The method has already been successfully integrated into online electronic textbooks used in US schools, and received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for this overall, finished reading product.

With regard to the formatting of the definitions; these are taken directly from public domain electronic dictionaries. We could have applied some of our algorithms to formatting these definitions. But as you know, dictionary entries are highly structured, and do not generally use complete natural language sentences. Our formatting is primarily for longer passages of true prose, and achieves its best effects with long, technical expository content (e.g., history textbooks).

Merci, encore, pour votres mots.

Randall Walker

Je pense que c’est juste un tour bon marché pour faire l’argent – l’humanité lit les textes carrés d’un-page pendant 3000 années, et vient ici « Walker Reading Technologies» et fait une révolution de lecture… Give me a break!

Je rejoins ce qui a été dit dans les deux précédents commentaires, cette technologie écarte tout ce qui est contexte et paratexte, or lorsque l’oeil balaie l’écran il enregistre aussi tous les éléments hors texte qui ont leur importance. Voir tous les travaux sur l’usabilité et l’ergonomie d’un site…
Par ailleurs j’utilise ce procédé en poésie, qui est alors dicté par le rythme propre de la phrase, où chaque césure correspond à une intention, voire à la respiration, ce qui est loin d’être le cas dans la technologie en objet.
Je pense que l’utilisation demeurera restreinte, dans le cas d’un apprentissage, comme déjà évoqué, mais sûrement pas pour un grand public.
Jean-Marie