[Corpora-List] Microsoft patents verb conjugations

[Peter Adolphs]

sciubba at uniroma3.it wrote:
> Well, I had a look at the patent site and they 
> skillfully admit that there are other tools doing 
> something similar
> [...]
> and anyway they propose this patent as a learning 
> tool

But they do this only in the detailed description. The title and
abstract are far more general in that it describes a system that allows
the user to enter a finite or infinite verb form and then retrieves and
displays the corresponding inflectional paradigm. That's it. And this
has already been done before. For example, the little program for French
verbs by Pierre Sarrazin called "Verbiste" comes to my mind. Verbiste
does exactly that what is described in paragraph [020], cf.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/sarrazip/dev/images/verbiste-2.png

The flow chart on the title page goes a bit beyond the abstract by
extending this with a spell checker in case that the word-form entered
by a user is unknown to the system. This is also done by all online
dictionaries that I know.

As Alexandre Rafalovitch already wrote, the "major claim left is the
cross-translation from the base language into the target language before
conjugation". So, as I understand it, the described system is at the end
a mere combination of an inflection system, a translation dictionary, a
spell-checker, and a display for inflectional paradigms, all of which
have been implemented in software before, either as single components or
combinations. Although the proposed combination of all those components
seems obvious and trivial to me, I haven't yet found such a software by
a quick internet search.

I'm a bit worried about claim 12:

    12. A computer-readable medium containing instructions for
    controlling a computer system to provide verb forms, by a
    method comprising: receiving a verb form; when the received
    verb form corresponds to different verbs, displaying the
    different verbs; and when a user selects a different verb,
    displaying verb forms of the selected different verb.

Wouldn't that apply to any computational morphology resource covering
verbs??

> So it seems to me that this is a computer-assisted 
> learning tool, since there is also the description of 
> some images (that I can't see, unfortunately).

Have you seen the Images button at the bottom of the page? There you can
view all the pages of the patent application as TIFF images.

Best regards!

-- 
Peter Adolphs    peter.adolphs at student.hu-berlin.de    gpg/pgp welcome!