Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

Preliminary Study of Validating Vocabulary Selection and Organization of A Manual Communication Board in Malay.

An integral component of a language-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system is providing vocabulary typical of fluent native language speakers. In the absence of reliable and valid research on Malay vocabulary for AAC, this descriptive study explored the validation process of vocabulary selection and organization for a 144-location manual communication board. An hour of aided language samples (talking while pointing to a prototype display) followed by self-administered surveys were gathered from four typical native Malay speakers (n=4), aged between 22 to 36 years at the University of Pittsburgh. Vocabulary frequency analysis, word commonality, and overall perceptions and feedback on the prototype display were compiled and analyzed. A total of 1112 word tokens and 454 word types were analyzed to support preliminary validation of the selected vocabulary and word organization of the prototype. Approximately 40% of the words on the display were used during the interview and the top 20 words were reported. Findings also suggest the importance of morphology and syntax considerations at early design stages. The positive overall perception of the display including vocabulary selection, the cultural and ethnicity appropriateness, and suggestions for system improvement were confirmed by the usability survey. Minimal rearrangement of the icon display needs to be performed to improve the usability of the system. Thus, the study findings support the early Malay manual communication board for AAC intervention. However, the limitation of the sample size and additional research is required to support a final display that optimizes vocabulary and morphosyntactic organization of a manual communication board in Malay

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Developing Adults\u27 Oral English Communicative Competence in an EFL Environment: Collaborative Studies of a Chinese EFL Teacher and Her Students

Economic and educational globalization presents Chinese college students with career and academic incentives to develop their oral English communicative competence; however, at the secondary level, students study English mainly for the purpose of written tests. As a result, their oral English learning is largely overlooked. In addition, significant challenges exist for learning oral English at the college level: large-sized classes, an English-as-a-foreign-language-learning (EFL) environment, traditional rote learning, student diversity, and different English-learning histories. This research aims at investigating effective teaching pedagogy suitable for large-sized college classes of students developing oral communicative competence in an EFL environment. With Vygotsky sociocultural theory as a foundation, I apply practitioner action research to conduct two phases of study. The action applies a collaborative, communication-oriented pedagogy in a large-sized oral English class. In phase one of the study, students\u27 group or pair work on communicative activities promotes and facilitates their social interactions in an EFL environment that enhance comprehensible input and output. In phase two of the study, continual practicing of communicative activities in groups or pairs facilitates their oral English grammatical knowledge, speaking strategies and sociocultural discourse rules through meaning negotiation and EFL teacher and or learners\u27 collaboration and assistance. Also, practicing communicative activities actively engages students in their own learning process and offers a new role for the EFL teacher: introducing language social rules, directing students to resources, encouraging peer-to-peer assistance, and focusing on feedback that enhances strategic competence. Therefore, I suggest that for developing students\u27 oral English communicative competence in an EFL environment with large-sized classes, consistent group or pair work using diverse communicative activities should be applied.\u2

Graphic organizers, activity, and the positioning of language and learners: An ethnographic case study

There were two main purposes for this research and one parallel purpose. One main purpose was to investigate how learners of English in an EFL/ESL context, who were also teachers of English and/or learning to be teachers of English, perceived and responded to different types of graphic organizers and associated activities. These graphic organizers and activities were presented at a university in Northern Thailand through an advanced reading comprehension course for preservice and inservice teachers taught by the primary researcher. The second main purpose was to explore, synthesize, and apply theories of mediated activity and research methods originating from or related to the work of the famous Russian troika of Vygotsky, Leont\u27ev, and Luria. The parallel purpose was to provide the participants with an insider\u27s perspective on qualitative case-study research that investigated their interactions and learning/teaching contexts. Participants in this study were nine MATEFL (Master of Arts (MA) in Teaching English as a Foreign Language) students from China, the Netherlands, Turkey, the U.S., and Thailand. The overall research design was an interpretive, ethnographic case study. Within this research design principles of Vygotsky\u27s developmental method were used (i.e., genetic method). Data collected included interviews, ethnographic fieldnotes of the participants\u27 use of graphic organizers in their teaching contexts, graphic organizers generated by the participants, and video and audio data of classroom interactions; The results were divided into three sections. Principles of Vygotsky\u27s developmental approach were primarily used for the first two sections. These microgenetic analyses revealed the intersubjective and interwoven nature of gesture and graphic representations as these were used to mediate content knowledge. The third section of the Results provided a broader view of the nine participants\u27 engagement with graphic organizers. Participants were found to have distinctive styles and preferences for different graphic organizers. Distinctive styles and preferences were related to the participants\u27 communities of teaching and learning practice. Findings have implications for learning English as a second or foreign language, literacy, teacher education, multicultural and cross-cultural education, and non-verbal speech. Moreover, the research design and theoretical lens were presented as appropriate for investigating language and literacy contexts

Multi-Task sequence prediction for Tunisian Arabizi multi-level annotation

In this paper we propose a multi-task sequence prediction system, based on recurrent neural networks and used to annotate on multiple levels an Arabizi Tunisian corpus. The annotation performed are text classification, tokenization, PoS tagging and encoding of Tunisian Arabizi into CODA* Arabic orthography. The system is learned to predict all the annotation levels in cascade, starting from Arabizi input. We evaluate the system on the TIGER German corpus, suitably converting data to have a multi-task problem, in order to show the effectiveness of our neural architecture. We show also how we used the system in order to annotate a Tunisian Arabizi corpus, which has been afterwards manually corrected and used to further evaluate sequence models on Tunisian data. Our system is developed for the Fairseq framework, which allows for a fast and easy use for any other sequence prediction problem

Persian ITAs and Speech Comprehensibility: Using CAPT for Pronunciation Improvement

Abstract It has been shown in the past that International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) struggle with phonological and communication issues in the classroom (Pickering, 1999; 2001). This issue leads to misunderstandings between ITAs and undergraduate students, frustrating them both as well as the parents of the students and the departments. However, studies have shown that with the right training, ITAs can focus on suprasegmental features, improving their speech comprehensibility and intelligibility (Gorusch, 2011). This study investigates the effect of Computer Assisted Pronunciation Teaching (CAPT) via tutorial videos and visual feedback on the improvement of ITAs’ speech comprehensibility. Across 5 US universities, 60 Persian ITAs, a video group (n=20), a visual feedback group(n=21), and a control group (n=19), completed an oral production pretest and recorded five diagnostic sentences plus spontaneous speech files. Over the next six weeks, all groups received in-person non-CAPT instruction, but the video group received and watched extra eight tutorial videos designed to target suprasegmental features and the feedback group was exposed to Praat visual feedback. Participants were also paired with a pronunciation tutor who provided instruction and feedback once a week. A perception posttest was administered, and the same 5 sentences with the spontaneous talk were once again recorded. The pre-and post-treatment sentences were then rated by 169 undergraduate students for comprehensibility. The findings of this study provide a greater understanding of how explicit instruction of pronunciation through CAPT can improve the speech comprehensibility of ITAs. The number of international people in academic and professional contexts is rising, it is necessary to guide them through appropriate instruction to improve their communication quality. The results of this study suggest that even short intervention programs that include targeted in-person tutoring, tutorial videos, and visual feedback may improve ITAs’ communications. Results also imply the need for pronunciation support for ITAs in their respective academic institutions

Combining translation into the second language and second language learning : an integrated computational approach

This thesis explores the area where translation and language learning intersects. However, this intersection is not one in the traditional sense of second language teaching: where translation is used as a means for learning a foreign language. This thesis treats translating into the foreign language as a separate entity, one that is as important as learning the foreign language itself. Thus the discussion in this thesis is especially relevant to an academic institution which contemplates training foreign language learners who can perform translation into the foreign language at a professional level. The thesis concentrates on developing a pedagogical model which can achieve the goal of fostering linguistic competence and translation competence at the same time. It argues that constructing such a model under a computerised framework is a viable approach, since the task of translation nowadays relies heavily on all kinds o

Learning English as a Foreign Language in a Blended Mode of Face-to-face and Online Discussions: A Case Study in a University in Taiwan

Learning English as a Foreign Language in a Blended Mode of Face-to-face and Online Discussions: A Case Study in a University in Taiwan Previous studies have documented many beneficial results arising from integrating online discussion with face-to-face instruction for language learning, yet the interactive process of students within both formal and informal contexts remains to be explored. This research examined the dynamics of student learning in blended face-to-face and online discussions in and after class in the context of learning English as a foreign language (EFL) in a university in Taiwan. An embedded case study was applied with a mixed-methods approach to investigate how students jointly accomplished tasks, and how this blended approach had contributed to their English learning. The data collected include the qualitative data of observations on three groups of 14 participants, three focus groups with 11 participants, 72 online discussion logs of the three groups and the quantitative data of 45 questionnaire responses. The findings revealed that students learned primarily through mediation of L1 and L2, through collaborative interaction, through co-construction of meaning, and from teacher and peer scaffolds. Students tended to provide information and suggestions in face-to-face discussions by using L1, but they expressed thoughts, gave comments and probed questions in online discussions by using L2. Students changed their interactive patterns from passive to active by mutually assisting each other in accomplishing tasks. Data also showed that students recognised that blended discussions had contributed to their cognitive, language, interactional and affective gains. Blended discussions were perceived as learner-centred undertakings that increased participation, collaboration and engagement. Four key factors were observed to have affected learning in this blended instruction. The research concludes that blended discussions changed the conventional EFL classroom culture and had a positive influence on student learning in terms of interaction, processes of meaning construction and perceptions. Keywords Online Discussion, Computer-Mediated Communication, Computer-Assisted Language Learning, Blended Learning, Collaborative interaction, Co-construction of Meanin