Method and apparatus for displaying definitions of selected words in a television program

1 . A method for generating information about words used in a TV program, comprising the steps of:

detecting automatically the words used in said TV program;

storing automatically a pre-list of the detected words with their number of occurrences as goes the TV program;

extracting automatically, from said pre-list, a list of relevant words in the TV program on the basis of their number of occurrences, said extraction being updated in real time;

displaying the extracted list of relevant words on the TV screen;

waiting for a selection of one of the extracted words by a user;

searching automatically information about said selected words; and

displaying this information on the screen.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the pre-list excludes common words previously stored.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the number of occurrences to consider a word as relevant is updated in real time.

4 . The method of claim 3 , wherein a word is considered as relevant if its number of occurrences is comprised between two thresholds.

5 . The method of claim 4 , wherein the thresholds are auto-adapted as goes the TV program.

6 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the information about a selected word is searched in a remote dictionary or the like.

7 . The method of claim 6 , wherein the information about a selected word is searched trough the Internet.

8 . The method of claim 7 , wherein the search is made on a pre-selected list of web sites.

9 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the search of information takes into account the field of the TV program, said field being broadcasted with the TV program to be extracted automatically with the relevant words.

10 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the pre-list is updated with words selected by the user.

11 . A System for generating information about words used in a TV program, comprising:

a TV set ( 1 ) or the like for displaying a TV program;

a processing unit ( 3 ) to extract automatically a list of relevant words in the TV program on the basis of the frequency of occurrences of the words;

a selecting tool ( 7 , 8 ) through which a watcher is capable of selecting one of the extracted words; and

a link ( 6 ) to an electronic dictionary to search information about the selected word.

12 . The system of claim 11 , wherein said processing unit ( 3 ) comprises at least a memory for storing a pre-list of detected words on the TV program and their number of occurrences.

13 . The system of claim 11 , wherein the link to the dictionary is a link to a remote network.

14 . The system of claim 11 , wherein the information about the selected word is displayed on a dedicated area (A 3 ) of the screen.

15 . The system of claim 11 , wherein the extracted words considered as relevant are displayed on the screen in a dedicated area (A 2 ) of the screen on which is displayed the TV program.

16 . The system of claim 15 , wherein the display of the extracted word is scrolled.

17 . The system of claim 11 , also comprising means to extract words from the Teletext channel of the TV program.