US Patent 8126700 Computer-assisted comprehension of texts

A solution is proposed for the data-handling system-assisted comprehension of texts (particularly, when they are written in a foreign language). For this purpose, a difficulty index is associated with each known word (for example, according to its frequency of use in standard texts). The words of a current document opened using the data-handling system are sorted according to their difficulty indexes. The words having the difficulty indexes higher than a threshold value (for example, based on the skill of a reader) are selected as difficult. A translation of each difficult word is then extracted from a dictionary; this translation is displayed close to each occurrence of the corresponding difficult word.