TextMaven is comprised of a set of tools facilitating a more systematic approach to extend your vocabulary. Basically, it provides various functions to either generate vocabulary lists in various formats or annotates words within eTexts with hyperlinks to a dictionary translation.
The tools distributed with TextMaven and their interaction is depicted in the following figure
| Analyzer | The Analyzer can be run on any eText. It generates a file, listing all words occurred in the eText which are are not listed in the specified list of words to be excluded. Depending on the options specified, the number of occurrences and the sentences the word occurred in are specified. In addition, the original eText is converted to HTML and each word not contained in the specified exclusion list is hyperlinked to the vocabulary list, eventually created with the Translator application. Exclusion lists for various basic vocabularies are provided. |
| Translator | The Translator performs a dictionary look up for each word listed in the input file. For English a stemming algorithm is implemented which performs word reduction until the specified word is found in one of the specified dictionary or no further reduction can be performed. The format of the vocabulary list can be controlled by specifying a writer. Writers are provided for HTML, MS Word (HTML optimized for display in Word), a format which can be converted into Microsofts Reader format, and a plain CSV format to be used for instance to import in vocabulary trainers. |
| GUI | The GUI facilitates the creation of word list to be feeded into the Translator. By directly looking up words while typing in the available dictionaries and auto completion it eases the process of creating word lists. The GUI is still experimental and is not considered to be stable or fully implemented. |
| Converter | The Converter application converts dictionaries into each other. For instance, for better performance the dictionaries included in the distribution can be easily converted into database backed dictionaries. |
TextMaven requires an implementation of the Java 2 platform, Standard Edition, version 1.4 or later. See http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4 for instructions on how to download Sun's J2SE implementation for Solaris, Linux, and Windows.
So far this release has only been extensively tested on WinXP. However, it should work on any other Win platforms as well. The database supported for database backed dictionaries is MySQL which has to be separately downloaded and installed.
In order to work with TextMaven you need to download two packages: the binary and the dictionary package. Since the dictionary package will not change a lot, this has the advantage that it need only be downloaded from time to time.