Non-English Bayes Nets

Although Netica Application is in English, it can be used to build Bayes nets in any language.  Netica can work with non-Latin and international character sets (such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, or Unicode), including generating SVG graphics with those characters.

The following are the places where Netica will accept text in any language (i.e. Unicode):

 Title of each node (not its name).

 Titles of all the states of each node (not their names).

 Comment (description) of each node.

 Comments for each state of each node.

 Title of the net (not its name).

 Overall comment (description) of the net.

 User-defined fields of nodes and the net.

These are sufficient for the Bayes net developer to provide the end-user with a Bayes net in their native language.

How To:  In any of the above places, you can paste in text from another program which uses a character set based on Unicode.  Or you can change the character set from the Windows task bar, and then type in the characters.  Or you can use Netica API to set/get them with Unicode strings.

Font:  Make sure you choose node fonts, which are capable of displaying the characters you desire.  A Unicode capable font, such as Arial Unicode MS, is usually a safe choice.

Black Rectangles:  You may just see just black rectangles where there should be non-English text.  If they appear on the net diagram, the problem is that the font that you have given the nodes is not capable of displaying the characters (as described in the paragraph above).  If they appear within dialog boxes, your computer needs to be configured to display the characters (as described in the paragraph below).  If the dialog box contains a row of question marks instead, that indicates an invalid place to be entering non-English text.

Configuring Computer:  To make international character sets available from the Windows XP task bar, choose Start Settings Control Panel Regional and Language Options Languages.  If you desire one of the languages mentioned at the bottom check-boxes, and the box is not check-marked, first check-mark the box, click OK, restart your computer, and return to this dialog box.

Then click Details Settings Add, choose an input language, keyboard layout and click OK.  You can now switch between different input languages using the Language Bar, which will appear (usually on the right side of the Windows task bar).

Websites for Characters:  For some character sets it is more convenient to generate the characters with a special program or website.

For example, see:  http://code.cside.com/

In particular:  http://code.cside.com/3rdpage/utf-8/ and

http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/