Reusability Of Nlp Tools For Detecting Rules And Contexts When Modelling Language Learners' Knowledge

This work shows how the reusability of computational tools previously developed for language studies is possible in the research of second language acquisition. Reusability is possible if the tools are independent from the language. We have adapted some tools (lemmatiser, spelling checker-corrector, morphological disambiguator ... ) in order to model the grammatical competence (Interlanguage) of Spanish learners of Basque, based on corpus analysis. The methodology for modelling includes the use of subsets of corpora for defining the models and the evaluation of these models by means of new subsets of corpora and expert teachers' opinion. Experiments and interviews with experts lead us to see the need of identifying the contexts where the grammatical rules are applied. We have made changes in this direction. 1 Introduction The main aim of this paper is to show in which way we have adapted Natural Language Processing tools previously developed by our group for the treatment of Basque. ..

Lexical Knowledge Representation in an Intelligent Dictionary Help System

This paper describes the knowledge representation model adopted in IDHS to represent the lexical knowledge acquired from the source dictionary. Once the acquisition process has been performed and the DKB built, some enrichment processes have been executed on the DKB in order to enhance its knowledge about the words in the language. Besides, the dynamic exploitation of this knowledge is made possible by means of specially conceived deduction mechanisms. Both the enrichment processes and the dynamic deduction mechanisms are based on the exploitation of the properties of the lexical semantic relations represented in the DKB. In the following section an overview of IDHS is given. Section 3 briefly presents the process of construction of the DKB. The knowledge representation model and the enrichment mechanisms are fully described in sections 4 and 5. Section 6 describes some inferential aspects of the system. Finally, in section 7, some figures about the size of the prototype built are presented. 2 THE IDHS DICTIONARY SYSTEM

A Natural Language Interface for Intelligent Tutoring Systems

In this paper we describe a natural language interface for tutorial tasks in ITS. Our proposal provides a new way to recognize and generate instructional dialogues capturing participant's intentions. To present knowledge in a problem-solving context, a tutor has to decide the sequence of instructional episodes; we see this task as a planning activity, and a full description of the proposed approach has been given in [4]. To communicate in a reasonable and cooperative way, the system must recognize what goals the student want to achieve at each point of the dialogue. In order to do this, NL-utterances have to be interpreted in their context. Previous works [7,8] on natural language processing for ITS systems present an approach where pedagogic strategies are interleaved with linguistic knowledge for generating tutorial discourse. Our proposal provides a new way to recognize and generate instructional dialogues capturing participant's intentions: we distinguish the pedagogical model from the discourse model, this one being managed by the interface. Written dialogues corresponding to a teaching session are composed by interrelated sentences

Conceptual Distance and Automatic Spelling Correction

. Text from different sources usually arrives under imperfect conditions. When an anomalous word is detected automatic word recognisers produce a list of candidates from which only one is correct. A variety of techniques have been devised to discriminate among the possible correction candidates. The project we are involved in tries to exploit linguistic knowledge in Spelling Correction. A preliminary investigation shows syntactic discrimination not to be enough. The gap could be covered by semantic techniques like conceptual distance. Basically, we define conceptual distance between two concepts as the shortest path length in the hierarchies of the lexical knowledge base of IDHS (Intelligent Dictionary Help System). We consider that a correction proposal that is closer to the surrounding words in the sentence is more plausible enabling us to produce a ranking of the proposals. It is our belief that conceptual distance can be also applied to other word recognition areas, such as handwri..

Morphosyntactic Disambiguation For Basque Based On The Constraint Grammar Formalism

This paper presents the development of a surface-based morphosyntactic parsing grammar, as well as the results obtained. It is based on the Constraint Grammar formalism which we find suitable for our project of disambiguating unrestricted texts. Besides, we will present a description of the main types of morphosyntactic ambiguity that we have identified and the disambiguation rules designed for their treatment. This work is the first step in the computational treatment of Basque syntax. Keywords: Morphosyntactic disambiguation Constraint Grammar Basque language Word Count: 3200 1 Introduction This paper describes the design of morphosyntactic disambiguation rules as a first step to develop a robust grammar of Basque, conceived as a general basis for different applications; for instance, a lemmatiser/tagger (Aduriz et al., 96) and a syntactic corrector (Gojenola and Sarasola, 94). We have chosen the Constraint Grammar (CG) formalism (Karlsson et al., 95; Voutilainen, 94; Tapanainen a..

An Implemented Interlanguage Model for Learners of Basque

this paper we mainly show the way in which we have adapted the Natural Language Processing tools for Basque previously developed by our group for the detection of both, deviant and correct linguistic structures at word level; this is the basis for the internal representation of the student's language knowledge, that is th

XUXEN: A Spelling Checker/Corrector for Basque Based on Two-Level Morphology

The application of the formalism of two-level morphology to Basque and its use in the elaboration of the XUXEN spelling checker/corrector are described. This application is intended to cover a large part of the language. Because Basque is a highly inflected language, the approach of spelling checking and correction has been conceived as a by-product of a general purpose morphological analyzer/generator. This analyzer is taken as a basic tool for current and future work on automatic processing of Basque. An extension for continuation class specifications in order to deal with long-distance dependencies is proposed. This extension consists basically of two features added to the standard formalism which allow the lexicon builder to make explicit the interdependencies of morphemes. User-lexicons can be interactively enriched with new entries enabling the checker from then on to recognize all the possible flexions derived from them. Due to a late process of standardization of the language, ..