ToGather: Linguistic Knowledge Extraction/Sharing System from Paper Documents

We usually annotate unknown words and useful expressions with a pen while reading documents written in foreign languages. Although such annotations include a great deal of linguistic knowledge that is required for future reading and writing, these annotations are seldom reused. We propose a system that generates Web-based content using the annotations collected from paper documents written in a foreign language. This system provides a paper-and-pen interface, which is acceptable to most of us. The generated content is specialized for language study, which helps us to internalize the linguistic knowledge in it. The experimental results with a prototype revealed that the system could detect most of the correct annotations with some failures. The system could also visualize the intellectual activity of individuals and a group.