Design of a Novel Web Utility that Provides Multi-lingual Word Definitions for Child E-Book Applications

The use of mobile computing devices to gain access to the Internet and to interact with a range of applications has become ubiquitous, impacting on education, entertainment, healthcare, and many other domains. Engaging applications such as e-books used by children and their parents or educators have also become increasingly common, especially in the context of childhood education. An e-book that presents the reader with challenging words has the potential to improve and expand vocabulary. However, the seamless combination of methods for definition-retrieval, word sense disambiguation, and multi-lingual support are not currently available in a simple tool for the specific application of children’s e-book reading. In this work, we present WordWeaver, an open-source tool for use in child reading scenarios where context-sensitive, multi-lingual definitions of unfamiliar words are determined and provided to the user via a simple web API. Our proof-of-concept design includes support for English, Spanish, and French language definitions. Preliminary results support the feasibility of WordWeaver including excellent levels of usability based on the System Usability Scale (i.e., mean SUS = 87.17). Future work will include extending support to include additional languages, definition selection tailored to individual reading skill level, and the ability to address more complicated cases of word and part-of-speech disambiguation.