SUGGESTION: Simple English definition please
Okay, I try to write instructions for Bible Study beginning with the very basics:
- Find passage
- Look up in a dictionary any word you do not know.
- Identify proper nouns . . .
- Identify cultural references . . .
- Identify technical terms . . .
I am trying to begin at the most basic level. However, Logos stymies me at step 2 ... it insists that if I am reading a Bible, then a Bible dictionary (or its equivalent) entry must be the most relevant. Not true!! at first what is most important is the simple meaning of the word in English ... my test case "disciple". Changing the priorities of the dictionaries does not help. Logos knows best ... even if it doesn't know that the user is a student or ESL person for whom a long Bible dictionary (or its equivalent) entry is simply another stumbling block not a help. This encourages readers to simply skip over words they don't know.
The same problem may be caused by the translation using uncommon words or archaic meanings.
Please add a way to reference a simple English dictionary. One possibility of how to do this would be to add an English dictionary to the Definition section of the Information Panel. Another possibility would be an ability to link to the dictionary in a "follow" type manner.
Edited to reflect NB Mick's correction.[:$]
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
Comments
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MJ. Smith said:
However, Logos stymies me at step 2 ... it insists that if I am reading a Bible, then a Bible dictionary entry must be the most relevant. Not true!! at first what is most important is the simple meaning of the word in English
It looks up the word in your highest-prioritised dictionary with English headwords. In the default priority order, we put Bible Dictionaries above English dictionaries, because we believe that a Bible Dictionary article on, say, “Jerusalem”, is going to be more helpful to the average student than an English dictionary entry.
If you disagree and you'd like an English dictionary to be looked up first, move one to the top of your priority list.
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MJ. Smith said:
Changing the priorities of the dictionaries does not help.
I'm not able to reproduce this; providing a screencast of how changing priority doesn't affect it may be helpful to our understanding the problem.
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If possible, I'd like to extend this request to include simple English definitions for any word, regardless of tense.
For example, I can't easily lookup the English definition for "believed," as mentioned here: No Information or Power Lookup results for some words?
Thanks to FL for including Carta and a Hebrew audio bible in Logos 9!
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MJ. Smith said:
However, Logos stymies me at step 2 ... it insists that if I am reading a Bible, then a Bible dictionary entry must be the most relevant. Not true!! at first what is most important is the simple meaning of the word in English
It looks up the word in your highest-prioritised dictionary with English headwords. In the default priority order, we put Bible Dictionaries above English dictionaries, because we believe that a Bible Dictionary article on, say, “Jerusalem”, is going to be more helpful to the average student than an English dictionary entry.
If you disagree and you'd like an English dictionary to be looked up first, move one to the top of your priority list.
Bradley, I disagreed with MJ in the other thread, however, using her example: looking up "disciples" opens NBD 3rd edition to disciple (jay, singular headword for a plural lookup) even if I put MW Collegiate Dictionary and the Concise Oxford ED on top of my prio list.
EDIT: (needless to say that both EDs have a headword Disciple, just as NBD has). Maybe a bug?
Have joy in the Lord!
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I so often get errors uploading video that I prefer screen shots. Sorry.
Example 1 - As I hate Strong's it is nowhere in my priority list .... so this went past all my English dictionaries that have been prioritized of which I show the highest.
Example 2: English prioritized above ABD
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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I can describe more accurately what is going on.
- If I double click on a word like "saliva" or "work" I can get the appropriate English language dictionary to open.
- If I double click on a word like "disciples" or "Rabbi" I get resources such as the ABD or UBS Handbook opening even though they are lower priority than the English dictionary.
This is a problem for students with limited English vocabulary or reading skills.
Edit: Further research shows it may be a stemming problem as "disciple" can be found and "disciples" cannot.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
Edit: Further research shows it may be a stemming problem as "disciple" can be found and "disciples" cannot.
This is almost certainly the root cause. Logos 7 does not stem English words when looking them up in a dictionary.
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My first reaction is "Are you kidding?" or "You've got to be crazy" or even "you idiots". But in a more calm and reasonable mood I would ask, why not? Doesn't that significantly reduce the usefulness of a lookup? And why does it sometimes look as if it does?
Edit: I would think that a significant percentage of users of the English dictionaries would be ESL users for whom stemming isn't second nature and youngish users expecting all apps to have definitions a tap/click away. But I now understand the "why" behind a number of forums posts over the years.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
My first reaction is "Are you kidding?" or "You've got to be crazy" or even "you idiots".
The fact that it's taken you seven years to notice that stemming isn't turned on in this scenario probably suggests it's not as bad a decision as you think....
Several of the English dictionaries provide their own stemming (especially Collins) that is hand-edited, rather than done with an algorithm. In many situations, that's better.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:
The fact that it's taken you seven years to notice that stemming isn't turned on in this scenario probably suggests it's not as bad a decision as you think....
'fraid not - it means that I had consistently found the function so useless I didn't bother to use it - I use my browser. I was forced to track the issue down now because of the complaints about "Logos easy mode" ... I'm trying to do a set of TIP's showing where the "easy mode" functions are ... only to find they ain't.
Edit: I only have English dictionaries that have come with packages: Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The Latter and the OED have been the go-to dictionaries teachers have led me to my entire life.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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MJ. Smith said:
But in a more calm and reasonable mood I would ask, why not? Doesn't that significantly reduce the usefulness of a lookup? And why does it sometimes look as if it does?
Stemming would introduce many false positives. It's also too broad in many cases; for example, looking up "substitutions" would find the headword with the same stem, "substitute", instead of the "root" English word, "substitution". For the hypothetical ESL user, this might be more confusing than helpful.
Many English dictionaries in our system already have inflected forms of the words in their headword index, which lets a lookup on that form go to the right article already. This is much more accurate than using stemming.
It would also require rebuilding all the milestone indexes in all resources to include stems, which would be a time-consuming task that might have to be run on every user's computer.
Anyway, there are pros and cons. It might be an improvement overall but it hasn't risen to the top of the priority list yet. We have a case in our bug tracker for this; I've added a link to this thread.
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Many English dictionaries in our system already have inflected forms of the words in their headword index, which lets a lookup on that form go to the right article already. This is much more accurate than using stemming.
Can we get a list of those so we can prioritize those specific dictionaries? Like MJ, I find myself in a browser more often than I'd expect when I'm already in Logos and already have English dictionaries available.
Thanks,
Donnie
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Donnie Hale said:
Can we get a list of those so we can prioritize those specific dictionaries?
Ditto.
But I'd have to wonder why one of those "inflected forms" dictionaries hasn't already been bundled in the base package, since it is a more accurate and less time-consuming (re)solution.
That would be a transparent improvement for everyone.
As an aside, I went to lookup "saviourhood" yesterday from a non-bible resource, and it couldn't find anything because of the UK spelling. Searching for "saviorhood" inside Logos didn't get a definition either, unfortunately. There must be some resource that could lookup these terms, without having to go outside the program.
Anyway, there are pros and cons. It might be an improvement overall but it hasn't risen to the top of the priority list yet. We have a case in our bug tracker for this; I've added a link to this thread.
Thanks!
Thanks to FL for including Carta and a Hebrew audio bible in Logos 9!
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Donnie Hale said:
Can we get a list of those so we can prioritize those specific dictionaries?
The ones I found are:
- https://www.logos.com/product/295/merriam-websters-collegiate-dictionary-tenth-ed
- https://www.logos.com/product/3427/collins-english-dictionary-complete-and-unabridged
- https://www.logos.com/product/26428/american-dictionary-of-the-english-language
I'll submit a suggestion to add more headwords to other dictionaries. (That would probably be cheaper for us to commission that data creation than to modify the program to use stemming when looking up words.)
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PetahChristian said:
As an aside, I went to lookup "saviourhood" yesterday from a non-bible resource, and it couldn't find anything because of the UK spelling. Searching for "saviorhood" inside Logos didn't get a definition either, unfortunately. There must be some resource that could lookup these terms, without having to go outside the program.
Implementing stemming wouldn't solve this problem; this is a good reminder that while stemming is a possible solution to this problem, it's not necessarily the best one.
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Interesting how the M-W 10th edition has the extra headwords, but the 11th edition doesn't. I power-looked-up "disciples", and the 10th was in the list but the 11th wasn't.
In spite of the 11th having more entries and more pictures, I've kept the 10th first in the priority list because it has better formatting. Frustrating how the later edition isn't necessarily better.
MacBook Pro (2019), ThinkPad E540
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I'll submit a suggestion to add more headwords to other dictionaries. (That would probably be cheaper for us to commission that data creation than to modify the program to use stemming when looking up words.)
I definitely support this--especially for English dictionaries that are presently being sold in Libraries.
“The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others and no one thinks about reforming himself.” St. Peter of Alcántara
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Donnie Hale said:
Can we get a list of those so we can prioritize those specific dictionaries?
The ones I found are:
- https://www.logos.com/product/295/merriam-websters-collegiate-dictionary-tenth-ed
- https://www.logos.com/product/3427/collins-english-dictionary-complete-and-unabridged
- https://www.logos.com/product/26428/american-dictionary-of-the-english-language
I'll submit a suggestion to add more headwords to other dictionaries. (That would probably be cheaper for us to commission that data creation than to modify the program to use stemming when looking up words.)
I cannot buy the 10th edition anymore but I do own the 11th edition. Is that tagged as well as the others? If not, why?
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SineNomine said:
I'll submit a suggestion to add more headwords to other dictionaries. (That would probably be cheaper for us to commission that data creation than to modify the program to use stemming when looking up words.)
I definitely support this--especially for English dictionaries that are presently being sold in Libraries.
[Y]
Thanks to FL for including Carta and a Hebrew audio bible in Logos 9!
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Many English dictionaries in our system already have inflected forms of the words in their headword index, which lets a lookup on that form go to the right article already. This is much more accurate than using stemming.
PetahChristian said:...I'd have to wonder why one of those "inflected forms" dictionaries hasn't already been bundled in the base package, since it is a more accurate and less time-consuming (re)solution.
This would seem to be a quick and easy solution. To M.J.'s point about "simple mode" tools working, this would seem like something that should be in the Starter packages.
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The ones I found are:
- https://www.logos.com/product/295/merriam-websters-collegiate-dictionary-tenth-ed
- https://www.logos.com/product/3427/collins-english-dictionary-complete-and-unabridged
- https://www.logos.com/product/26428/american-dictionary-of-the-english-language
I'll submit a suggestion to add more headwords to other dictionaries.
Power lookup of natures using Logos 7.2 Beta 2 also finds Merriam-Webster's Spanish-English Dictionary
Keep Smiling [:)]
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I definitely support this as well! PLEASE!
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