Intelligent Dictionary Interfaces: Usability Evaluation of Access-Supporting Enhancements

The present paper describes psycholinguistic experiments aimed at exploring the way people behave while accessing electronic dictionaries. In our work we focused on the access by meaning that, in comparison with the access by form, is currently less studied and very seldom implemented in modern dictionary interfaces. Thus, the goal of our experiments was to explore dictionary users’ requirements and to study what services an intelligent dictionary interface should be able to supply to help solving access by meaning problems. We tested several access-supporting enhancements of electronic dictionaries based on various language resources (corpora, wordnets, word association norms and explanatory dictionaries). Experiments were carried out with native speakers of three European languages – English, Czech and Russian. Results for monolingual and bilingual cases are presented.