Generating learner-like morphological errors in Russian

Abstract To speed up the process of categorizing learner errors and obtaining data for languages which lack error-annotated data, we describe a linguistically-informed method for generating learner-like morphological errors, focusing on Russian. We outline a procedure to select likely errors, relying on guiding stem and suffix combinations from a segmented lexicon to match particular error categories and relying on grammatical information from the original context

Working with the CHILDES tools : transcription, coding and analysis

The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) consists of Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT), Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN), and a database. There is also an online manual which includes the CHILDES bibliography, the database, and the CHAT conventions as well as the CLAN instructions. The first three parts of this paper concern the CHAT format of transcription, grammatical coding, and analyzing transcripts by using the CLAN programs. The fourth part shows examples of transcribed and coded data

Computer-assisted transcription and analysis of speech

The two papers included in this volume have developed from work with the CHILDES tools and the Media Editor in the two research projects, "Second language acquisition of German by Russian learners", sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, from 1998 to 1999 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) and "The age factor in the acquisition of German as a second language", sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), Bonn, since 2000 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Christine Dimroth, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen). The CHILDES Project has been developed and is being continuously improved at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, under the supervision of Brian MacWhinney. Having used the CHILDES tools for more than ten years for transcribing and analyzing Greek child data there it was no question that I would also use them for research into the acquisition of German as a second language and analyze the big amount of spontaneous speech gathered from two Russian girls with the help of the CLAN programs. When in the spring of 1997, Steven Gillis from the University of Antwerp (in collaboration with Gert Durieux) developed a lexicon-based automatic coding system based on the CLAN program MOR and suitable for coding languages with richer morphologies than English, such as Modern Greek. Coding huge amounts of data then became much quicker and more comfortable so that I decided to adopt this system for German as well. The paper "Working with the CHILDES Tools" is based on two earlier manuscripts which have grown out of my research on Greek child language and the many CHILDES workshops taught in Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Brazil over the years. Its contents have now been adapted to the requirements of research into the acquisition of German as a second language and for use on Windows

Multiple Admissibility in Language Learning: : Judging Grammaticality using Unlabeled Data

We present our work on the problem of detection Multiple Admissibility (MA) in language learning. Multiple Admissibility occurs when more than one grammatical form of a word fits syntactically and semantically in a given context. In second-language education—in particular, in intelligent tutoring systems/computer-aided language learning (ITS/CALL), systems generate exercises automatically. MA implies that multiple alternative answers are possible. We treat the problem as a grammaticality judgement task. We train a neural network with an objective to label sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical, using a "simulated learner corpus": a dataset with correct text and with artificial errors, generated automatically. While MA occurs commonly in many languages, this paper focuses on learning Russian. We present a detailed classification of the types of constructions in Russian, in which MA is possible, and evaluate the model using a test set built from answers provided by users of the Revita language learning system.Peer reviewe

Using authentic texts for grammar exercises for a minority language

Source at http://www.ep.liu.se/index.en.asp.This paper presents an ATICALL (Authentic Text ICALL) system with automatic visual input enhancement activities for training complex inflection systems in a minority language. We have adapted the freely available VIEW system which was designed to automatically generate activities from any web content. Our system is based on finite state transducers (FST) and Constraint Grammar, originally built for other purposes. The paper describes ways of handling ambiguity in the target form in the exercises, and ways of handling the challenges for VIEW posed by authentic text, typical for a minority language: variations in orthography, and large proportion of nonnormative forms.</p

Autenttisiin teksteihin perustuva tietokoneavusteinen kielen oppiminen: sovelluksia italian kielelle

Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is one of the sub-disciplines within the area of Second Language Acquisition. Clozes, also called fill-in-the-blank, are largely used exercises in language learning applications. A cloze is an exercise where the learner is asked to provide a fragment that has been removed from the text. For language learning purposes, in addition to open-end clozes where one or more words are removed and the student must fill the gap, another type of cloze is commonly used, namely multiple-choice cloze. In a multiple-choice cloze, a fragment is removed from the text and the student must choose the correct answer from multiple options. Multiple-choice exercises are a common way of practicing and testing grammatical knowledge. The aim of this work is to identify relevant learning constructs for Italian to be applied to automatic exercises creation based on authentic texts in the Revita Framework. Learning constructs are units that represent language knowledge. Revita is a free to use online platform that was designed to provide language learning tools with the aim of revitalizing endangered languages including several Finno-Ugric languages such as North Saami. Later non-endangered languages were added. Italian is the first majority language to be added in a principled way. This work paves the way towards adding new languages in the future. Its purpose is threefold: it contributes to the raising of Italian from its beta status towards a full development stage; it formulates best practices for defining support for a new language and it serves as a documentation of what has been done, how and what remains to be done. Grammars and linguistic resources were consulted to compile an inventory of learning constructs for Italian. Analytic and pronominal verbs, verb government with prepositions, and noun phrase agreement were implemented by designing pattern rules that match sequences of tokens with specific parts-of-speech, surfaces and morphological tags. The rules were tested with test sentences that allowed further refining and correction of the rules. Current precision of the 47 rules for analytic and pronominal verbs on 177 test sentences results in 100%. Recall is 96.4%. Both precision and recall for the 5 noun phrase agreement rules result in 96.0% in respect to the 34 test sentences. Analytic and pronominal verb, as well as noun phrase agreement patterns, were used to generate open-end clozes. Verb government pattern rules were implemented into multiple-choice exercises where one of the four presented options is the correct preposition and the other three are prepositions that do not fit in context. The patterns were designed based on colligations, combinations of tokens (collocations) that are also explained by grammatical constraints. Verb government exercises were generated on a specifically collected corpus of 29074 words. The corpus included three types of text: biography sections from Wikipedia, Italian news articles and Italian language matriculation exams. The last text type generated the most exercises with a rate of 19 exercises every 10000 words, suggesting that the semi-authentic text met best the level of verb government exercises because of appropriate vocabulary frequency and sentence structure complexity. Four native language experts, either teachers of Italian as L2 or linguists, evaluated usability of the generated multiple-choice clozes, which resulted in 93.55%. This result suggests that minor adjustments i.e., the exclusion of target verbs that cause multiple-admissibility, are sufficient to consider verb government patterns usable until the possibility of dealing with multiple-admissible answers is addressed. The implementation of some of the most important learning constructs for Italian resulted feasible with current NLP tools, although quantitative evaluation of precision and recall of the designed rules is needed to evaluate the generation of exercises on authentic text. This work paves the way towards a full development stage of Italian in Revita and enables further pilot studies with actual learners, which will allow to measure learning outcomes in quantitative term

Businessmen and Ballerinas Take Different Forms: A Strategic Resource for Acquiring Russian Vocabulary and Morphology

Included in the tasks facing a language learner is the acquisition of a lexicon and a grammar. However, when the target language has inflectional morphology, these two parts of the language-learning task intersect in the paradigms of grammatical word forms because each open-class lexeme has a number of forms that allow it to express various combinations of grammatical categories. Among major world languages, Russian is relatively highly inflected, meaning that the challenges of acquiring vocabulary are compounded by the need to master the inflectional morphology. Even a modest basic vocabulary of a few thousand inflected lexemes has over a hundred thousand associated word forms. Recent research (Janda and Tyers 2018, described in more detail below) suggests that there could be an advantage to learning only a handful of high-frequency forms for each lexeme. Section 2 reviews distributional facts about paradigms, their theoretical implications, and the results of a computational experiment that simulates the learning of Russian paradigms either in their entirety or based only on the most frequent word forms. Section 3 presents a free public net-based resource, the Strategic Mastery of Russian Tool (SMARTool), which takes up the challenge of providing strategic input for second-language (L2) learning of Russian vocabulary. The design functions and some pedagogical applications of the SMARTool are detailed. Conclusions are offered in Section 4

The ASK Corpus – a Language Learner Corpus of Norwegian as a Second Language

In our paper we present the design and interface of ASK, a language learner corpus of Norwegian as a second language which contains essays collected from language tests on two different proficiency levels as well as personal data from the test takers. In addition, the corpus also contains texts and relevant personal data from native Norwegians as control data. The texts as well as the personal data are marked up in XML according to the TEI Guidelines. In order to be able to classify errors in the texts, we have introduced new attributes to the TEI corr and sic tags. For each error tag, a correct form is also in the text annotation. Finally, we employ an automatic tagger developed for standard Norwegian, the Oslo-Bergen Tagger , together with a facility for manual tag correction. As corpus query system, we are using the Corpus Workbench developed at the University of Stuttgart together with a web search interface developed at Aksis, University of Bergen. The system allows for searching for combinations of words, error types, grammatical annotation and personal data.publishedVersio