Lapis is an experimental

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

and

text editor A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. An example of such program is "notepad" software (e.g. Windows Notepad). Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, and can be used to c ...

allowing simultaneous editing of text in multiple selections. Lapis is able to infer the list of selected elements automatically from positive and negative examples given by the user, during a process known as ''selection guessing'', based on

concept learning Concept learning, also known as category learning, concept attainment, and concept formation, is defined by Jerome Bruner, Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) as "the search for and testing of attributes that can be used to distinguish exemplars fro ...

. This ability occurs via, and is an instance of,

programming by example In computer science, programming by example (PbE), also termed programming by demonstration or more generally as demonstrational programming, is an end-user development technique for machine learning, teaching a computer new behavior by demonstratin ...

. The multiple items to edit are selected automatically according to the example provided by the user, making this experimental feature unique to Lapis among text editors, though similar features exist in some web scrapers and data munging tools. To create the selection, Lapis first determines the more salient properties of the items selected by the user in a process called ''feature generation'', detects common features of the user-selected items, groups these features to create a hypotheses for the concept that defines the selection, and then applies the generalized concept to the whole text. Lapis also features outlier detection, marking in red those items selected that have a low matching score, thus allowing users to review the automatic decisions made by the algorithm. Lapis includes a template vocabulary to assist editing several kinds of structured languages. One such language is HTML. Lapis includes a Web browser view that allows its multiple edit feature to work on web pages in a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for what you see is what you get, refers to software that allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed document, web ...

way, through automatic matching of the underlying HTML tags. The software is programmed in various languages, mainly

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

, and released under version 2 of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

(GPLv2), with various dependencies provided under other licenses.

References

LAPIS: Smart Editing with Text Structure
introductory article.

an extended description.
Multiple selections in smart text editing@ CiteseerX
, Robert C. Miller, Brad A. Myers. 103-110

Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 13–16, 2002, San Francisco, California, USA. ACM, 2002, : describes how multiple selections can automate repetitive text editing and introduce the concept of ''selection guessing''.
Toolkits for Generating Wrappers
by Stefan Kuhlins, Ross Tredwell.
Entity quick click: rapid text copying based on automatic entity extraction
by Eric A. Bier, Edward W. Isha. Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Copy-and-Paste between Overlapping Windows
by Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel. In Proceedings of CHI'07. "''Other systems have been proposed to support fast copy-paste of multiple selections or text entities like phone numbers''".

External links

* (se

* {{Official website, groups.csail.mit.edu/uid MIT CSAIL, User Interface Design Group

(archived)
Download (mirror)
Free text editors Free HTML editors Software using the GNU General Public License Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Windows text editors Linux text editors

See also

References

External links