What Is Jishonary and How It Works

What is Jishonary?

Jishonary is a growing dictionary.

Even if there is no existing article for a word you look up, the AI will write the content on the spot and display it for you.

Once a first draft has been created in this way, the headword is picked up by a regularly scheduled refinement process that uses more advanced algorithms to improve the content.

Even after the initial refinement, entries continue to be evaluated by this ongoing process, so the content is always being improved incrementally.

The founder is also continuously experimenting — in collaboration with AI — to find better ways to improve the refinement process itself and determine what entries a dictionary should include.

We are not yet fully satisfied with the quality of our basic article generation, so we plan to keep polishing that aspect. In the future, we also aim to add richer content such as audio pronunciation examples and illustrations that convey the "feel" of a word, working toward a more comprehensive online dictionary service.

There is also a feature that has been part of Jishonary from the very beginning — one of my personal passions that the AI had a hard time understanding.
For example, "an English-French dictionary written in Japanese" — a combination that probably does not exist in any physical dictionary — is available as an option in Jishonary.

Such combinations have never existed because the demand is far too small relative to the enormous effort required to create them.
With Jishonary, we can offer foreign-to-foreign dictionaries written in your native language — not as a practical tool, but as an enjoyable read.
I believe this may be a world-first. Even when the AI asked, "What do you mean? Isn't the third one the UI language?" I insisted, "No, the third one is the language of the explanation!!" and went ahead with the implementation. Please enjoy this new world!!

(Translated with DeepL.com and corrected with Grammarly)

Who is Aki. Kuramoto?

Software Engineer, Founder of Jishonary

Born in Yokosuka, Japan in 1979. As a kindergartner, he was tricked by his older sister into spending his precious pocket money on the Famicom (NES) version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and ended up learning to read Japanese hiragana through tears.
After starting elementary school, he got his hands on the Famicom version of Dragon Quest I — drawn in purely by the cool box art, without realizing it was made by the same company as Portopia — only to find himself stuck in the king's throne room, crying again.
But he was thoroughly captivated by Dragon Quest, and began dreaming of making games like it. From that point on, every time he saw his parents, the only words out of his mouth were: "I want a computer."

His wish was eventually granted — sort of. The PC-9801 FA that arrived was supposed to be shared with his sister, but she declared, "Huh? This is MINE, though!?" and barely let him touch it. He managed to teach himself BASIC programming during the hours when she was out.
After years of saving, he finally got his own PC-9821 V7 and began programming in earnest.

He wanted to become a game programmer, but despite being in the middle of Japan's brutal employment ice age, he'd been far too casual about his job search and failed to land a position at any game company. He ended up at an IT subsidiary of a major record label (narrowly avoiding becoming one of the first class of post-2000 jobless graduates).
Spending his nights printing reports on mainframes using COBOL/JCL and literally gluing them together, he grew increasingly disillusioned and quit — without having another job lined up — thinking, "I still want to be a game programmer."

He managed to sneak into the game industry through a staffing agency rather than as a direct hire, and became a console game programmer starting in the PS2 / GameCube era.
Thrilled to finally be doing the work he loved, he pushed himself through grueling hours — until his health gave out and he was let go. Then a director at the staffing agency made him an outrageous offer:
"I've got a friend who runs a game company in Korea, and he keeps bugging me to introduce him to a Japanese game programmer. You just got cut and have no work anyway, right? Why don't you go?"
He thought, "Come to think of it, I always wanted to live abroad at least once. If I don't take this chance, I'll be a man who dies without ever leaving Japan." And so, without speaking a single word of Korean, he said yes.

He joined a Korean game company as its only Japanese employee. The project he inherited was supposed to be a mobile spin-off of a prestigious PlayStation 3D RPG, but what was actually running was a Dungeon Master-style 90-degree-rotation program — and the deadline was just days away. The situation was completely hopeless.
He had them throw out all the existing source code, then worked nearly around the clock for about two months, single-handedly rebuilding the entire game from scratch to completion. The original deadline was blown by a wide margin, but the recovery was nothing short of a miracle.

After returning to Japan, he spent time developing mobile phone middleware and working as a server-side engineer in e-commerce. When the social gaming bubble arrived, he re-entered the game industry as a server-side engineer,
freelancing across many companies and becoming well-versed in the common patterns of game server-side development.

When AI emerged, he started exploring how to leverage it — while spouting things like "AI is the child species of humanity as a species," which made little sense to most people. Then one day, it hit him:
"Online dictionary services used to have pretty unobtrusive ads, but lately every single one of them has gotten annoyingly aggressive with their advertising. You'd think with AI these days, someone could just generate the content — aren't they worried that ruining the user experience like that is just inviting someone to come along and replace them?"
And then: "Well, why don't I just build one myself?" — and Jishonary was born.

He had long noticed something: "An 英和辞典 (Eiwa Jiten) and an English-Japanese dictionary look like the same thing said in different languages, but they're actually different. The Eiwa Jiten a Japanese student uses and the English-Japanese dictionary an American student uses have their explanations written in different languages." Expanding on this insight, he realized:
"That means a dictionary that looks up French words from English headwords, but with the explanations written in Japanese — that should also exist along this same axis." So he built it.
The result: a probably-world-first online dictionary service that supports "a dictionary from Language 1 to Language 2, with explanations written in Language 3" — a combination that had never existed before.

If Jishonary succeeds and he finds himself with more free time, his next ambition is to release his own programming language (it's actually already pretty far along).

Jishonary とは何か (Japanese)

Jishonary は成長する辞書です。

入力された単語に該当する記事が存在しなくても
AI がその場で内容を執筆し、表示してくれます。

また、こうして初稿が作られた見出し語は、定期実行される改善処理に拾われて、
より高度なアルゴリズムによって、内容を洗練させます。

初回の改善以降も随時、よりよい内容に変更する為に定期実行される改善処理に評価され続けます。
このように、常に少しずつ内容を改善していく仕組みが備わっています

また、この改善処理自体の内容や辞書として設けるべき項目については、創立者が AI と話し合いながら
更によくする方法を継続して試行錯誤しています。

現在はまだ基本的な記事生成の品質に満足できていない為、その部分を更に磨きをかけようと思っていますが
将来的には単語の発声例を再生したり、図示でその語の「感覚」を伝えたりなど
より厚みのある情報も付け加えていき、より充実したオンライン辞書サービスになる事を目指しています。

また、私の拘りの一つで、なかなか AI に理解してもらえなかった機能が、Jishonary には最初から入っています
例えば『日本語で書いてある英仏辞書』という、物理的な辞書にはおそらく実在しないのではないか、という組み合わせが
Jishonary では選択可能です

このような組み合わせは、作成に必要な多大な労力に対して、需要が少なすぎる為に実在してこなかったと思います。
Jishonary なら実用性は度外視の楽しい読み物として、母国語で書かれた外国語から外国語への辞書を提供できます。
これはおそらく、世界初の試みなのではないかと思い、AI から「どういう事ですか? UI 言語ではないのですか?」と聞かれても
「違います、三つめは説明の言語なんです!!」と押し通して実装したものです。新たな世界を是非、楽しんでください!!

Who is Aki. Kuramoto?

ソフトウェアエンジニア, Jishonary 創始者

1979年 横須賀生まれ。幼稚園児の時に姉に騙され、なけなしのお金でファミコン版ポートピア連続殺人事件を購入、泣きながらひらがなを覚える。
小学校入学後、ポートピアと同じ会社のソフトだと知らずにパッケージのかっこよさだけでファミコン版ドラクエ1を入手、王様の部屋から出られずに泣く。
しかしどっぷりドラクエに魅了され「僕もこんなゲームが作りたい」と思うようになり、親の顔をみるたびに「パソコンが欲しい」としか言わない状態になる。

念願かなって姉と共同という事で入手したつもりの PC-9801 FA は『は? これは私のだけど!?』となかなか触らせてもらえなかったものの、姉のいない時間などに BASIC でプログラミングを学習。
仕方がないので数年かけて自分でも PC-9821 V7 を入手、本格的にプログラミングを始める。

ゲームプログラマーになりたいと思うようになっていたが、氷河期真っただ中にも関わらず就職活動をなめ過ぎていた為、ゲーム会社には就職ならず、某大手レコード会社の情報システム系関連会社に就職 (あやうく2000年代最初の就職浪人たちの一人になるところだった)。
汎用機と COBOL/JCL に泣きながら、夜勤で帳票を出力しては糊付けする日々に疑問を抱き「やっぱりゲームプログラマーになりたい」と次も決まってないのに退職。

社員ではなく人材仲介系の会社に繋いでもらうという形でなんとかゲーム業界に忍び込み、PS2, GameCube 時代からコンソールゲームのプログラマーになる。
「やっとやりたい仕事につけた」と喜んで激務を続けた結果、ちょっと体調を崩し仕事を切られるも、お世話になっていた仲介系の会社の部長から
「韓国のゲーム会社の社長が友達に居るんだけど、日本人のゲームプログラマー紹介しろってうるさいんだよね。倉本くんさ、切られちゃって仕事もないじゃん? 行ってみない?」とかなりの無茶ぶりをされるが、
「そういえば人生の中で一度は外国に暮らしてみたいと思ってた。このチャンスに行かないなら、俺は日本を出ずに死ぬ男だ。」と、一言も韓国語しゃべれないくせに了承。

韓国のゲーム会社に、唯一の日本人社員として飛び込み、プレイステーション用の高名な 3D RPG の携帯電話向け外伝作品制作の仕事なのに
動いているのはダンジョンマスターのような90°回転式のプログラムで、既に納期が数日後に迫っているという完全に終わってる仕事を引き継ぎ、
全部のソースを捨てさせ、そこからほぼ不眠不休で二か月ほど、プログラマーとしては一人だけでゼロから完成までもちこみ、当初の納期よりは大幅に遅れたものの、リカバリーを成功させるという奇跡を起こす。

日本に帰国してからはしばらく携帯電話のミドルウェア開発や EC 関連のサーバーサイドエンジニアとして過ごしていたものの、ソシャゲバブルが到来したのでサーバーサイドエンジニアとしてゲーム業界に再挑戦、
フリーランスとして多くの会社を渡り歩き、ゲーム系サーバーサイドの「共通点」がわかる程度に精通する。

AI の登場に「AI は人類という種の子供達にあたる種になるんだ」という、普通の人にはよくわからない寝言みたいな事を言いながら AI 活用の方法を模索している時にふと
「昔はオンライン辞書サービスの広告っておとなしいものが多かったけど、最近どのサービスもうっとおしい広告を出すようになったな。こんなのこれからは AI で生成してもいいのに強気なもんだ。」
と思って「じゃあ、自分で作ってみるか。」と Jishonary 制作に取り掛かる。

以前から気づいていた「英和辞典と English-Japanese dictionary は同じものを違う言語で言っているだけにみえて、実は違うものだ。日本の学生が使う英和辞典と、アメリカの学生が使う English-Japanese dictionary は解説の言語が違うから」という部分から発想を広げた結果
「つまり、英単語から対応するフランス語を引く辞書なんだけど、その解説は日本語で書いてあるっていう辞書も、この法則の先にはあるな」と考え、実装。
結果、今まで世界に存在しなかった「言語1から言語2への辞書だが、解説は言語3で書いてある辞書」に対応した、多分世界初のオンライン辞書サービスを爆誕させた。

Jishonary が成功して自由な時間が増えたら、次は自作プログラミング言語を発表したいと野心を募らせている (実はもうけっこうできている)。

Jishonary Founder Aki. Kuramoto