Computer Assisted Language Learning Based on Corpora and Natural Language Processing : The Experience of Project CANDLE

This paper describes Project CANDLE, an ongoing 3-year project which uses various corpora and NLP technologies to construct an online English learning environment for learners in Taiwan. This report focuses on the interim results obtained in the first eighteen months. First, an English-Chinese parallel corpus, Sinorama, was used as the main course material for reading, writing, and culture-based learning courses. Second, an online bilingual concordancer, TotalRecall, and a collocation reference tool, TANGO, were developed based on Sinorama and other corpora. Third, many online lessons, including extensive reading, verb-noun collocations, and vocabulary, were designed to be used alone or together with TotalRecall and TANGO. Fourth, an online collocation check program, MUST, was developed for detecting V-N miscollocation and suggesting adequate collocates in student’s writings based on the hypothesis of L1 interference and the database of BNC and the bilingual Sinorama Corpus. Other computational scaffoldings are under development. It is hoped that this project will help intermediate learners in Taiwan enhance their English proficiency with effective pedagogical approaches and versatile language reference tools

A Hybrid Accurate Alignment method for large Persian-English corpus construction based on statistical analysis and Lexicon/Persian Word net

A bilingual corpus is considered as a very important knowledge source and an inevitable requirement for many natural language processing (NLP) applications in which two languages are involved. For some languages such as Persian, lack of such resources is much more significant. Several applications, including statistical and example-based machine translation needs bilingual corpora, in which large amounts of texts from two different languages have been aligned at the sentence or phrase levels. In order to meet this requirement, this paper aims to propose an accurate and hybrid sentence alignment method for construction of an English-Persian parallel corpus. As the first step, the proposed method uses statistical length based analysis for filtering of candidates. Punctuation marks are used as a directing feature to reduce the complexity and increase the accuracy. Finally, the proposed method makes use of some lexical knowledge in order to produce the final output. . In the phase of lexical analysis, a bilingual dictionary as well as a Persian semantic net (denoted as FarsNet) is used to calculate the extended semantic similarity. Experiments showed the positive effect of expansion on synonym words by extended semantic similarity on the accuracy of the sentence alignment process. In the proposed matching scheme, a semantic load based approach (which considers the verb as the pivot and the main part of a sentence) was also used in order for increasing the accuracy. The results obtained from the experiments were promising and the generated parallel corpus can be used as an effective knowledge source by researchers who work on Persian language