Kirrkirr:
A flexible and approachable software interface to indigenous dictionaries 

Christopher D. Manning and Kristen Parton
Depts of Computer Science and Linguistics, Stanford University
Gates Building 4A, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford CA 94305-9040, USA
manning@cs.stanford.edu | www.stanford.edu/~manning/ 

This demonstration presents Kirrkirr, a Java-based visualization tool
for XML dictionaries, currently being used with a dictionary for
Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language.  Kirrkirr runs on all major
platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix).

The leading aim of this work was accessibility: providing software that
would make existing indigenous language data usable by people other
than tertiary-educated linguists with good computer skills. Within the
Australian context, indigenous dictionary structure and usability has
usually been dictated by professional linguists, while the needs of
others (speakers, semi-speakers, young users, teachers, second language
learners) are not met. Such an approach is rapidly coming to be seen as
unacceptable: we believe that it is undesirable as a field linguistics
methodology, and unfortunate from the points of view of community
involvement and language maintenance. As in some of the famous American
structuralist work, the best results will come from actively enlisting
native speakers, and this requires appropriate tools. This is especially
true when dealing with something as large as the lexicon of a language,
or as subtle as its semantics.

A second goal was to make better use of computers for visualization,
hypertext linking, interactivity, and multimedia in order to provide a
richer experience of dictionary content. As potential users, we
particularly focussed on school children, who are the largest group of
native speakers with some literacy skills. Our goal is to provide a fun
dictionary tool that is effective for browsing and incidental language
learning, as well as for serious research, in part because indications
are that current interfaces are unlikely to have much direct educational
benefit for students (Kegl 1995). From this viewpoint, the low level of
literacy in the region, and the inherently captivating nature of
computers suggests that an e-dictionary is potentially more useful than
a paper edition. Among other benefits, we can provide an interface less
dependent on good knowledge of spelling and alphabetical order, by
giving user supports. The interface can select from and choose how to
present information, in ways customized to a user's preferences and
abilities.  Some recent work has focused on putting games and
activiities into Kirrkirr, so that it can better support classroom-based
exploration. Other work has looked at making the underlying
Warlpiri-English dictionary (Laughren and Hale, to appear) effectively
usable as an English-Warlpiri dictionary -- something teachers and the
community would greatly like.

Colleagues have done usability testing of paper dictionaries and earlier
versions of Kirrkirr with various Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups
(Corris et al., 2000, in submission). While formal comparisons are
difficult in this context, results have supported the value of
computer interfaces for many uses, and Kirrkirr is now being used
spontaneously by Indigenous users.