InLéctor: enhanced bilingual e-books for language learning

Abstract

The InLéctor project aims to promote reading in original language, offering an interactive scenario which facilitates foreign language teaching and selflearning, as well as the study of literature. In order to achieve this aim, the project develops computational techniques which provide automatically generation of bilingual e-books, incorporating dictionaries, ontologies and audios. Bilingual reading offers the option of moving from the original text to the translated one with a single click. The audio support is based on the human reading of the work in its original language. Moreover, it is planned to incorporate an interactive dictionary service which will show in advance the most difficult words in the text according to the language level of the user. Augmented information will also provide links to encyclopedic entries, images and audio directly related to the fragment of the text being read. The project ensures the creation and distribution of these parallel books in different output formats (html, epub and mobi), which are compatible with the most common tablets and e-books nowadays. The literary works and their translations are published in the public domain. The developed programs are based on free software and will also be published under a free license.