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

WikiSense: Supersense Tagging of Wikipedia Named Entities Based WordNet

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Testing MSW effect in Supernova Explosion with Neutrino event rates

Flavor transitions in supernova neutrinos are yet to be determined. We present a method to probe whether or not the Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein effects occur as SN neutrinos propagate outward from the SN core by investigating time evolutions of neutrino event rates for different flavors in different kinds of detectors. As the MSW effect occurs, the $\nu_e$ flux swaps with the $\nu_x$ flux, which represents any one of $\nu_{\mu}$, $\nu_{\tau}$, $\bar{\nu}_{\mu}$, and $\bar{\nu}_{\tau}$ flux, either fully or partially depending on the neutrino mass hierarchy. During the neutronization burst, the $\nu_e$ emission evolves in a much different shape from the emissions of $\bar{\nu}_e$ and $\nu_x$ while the latter two evolve in a similar pattern. Meanwhile, the luminosity of the the $\nu_e$ emission is much larger than those of the $\bar{\nu}_e$ and $\nu_x$ emissions while the latter two are roughly equal. As a consequence, the time-evolution pattern of the $\nu_e{\rm Ar}$ event rates in the absence of the MSW effect will be much different from that in the occurrence of the MSW effect, in either mass hierarchy. With the simulated SN neutrino emissions, the $\nu_e{\rm Ar}$ and inverse beta decay event rates are evaluated. The ratios of the two cumulative event rates are calculated for different progenitor masses up to $100~{\rm ms}$. We show that the time evolutions of this cumulative ratios can effectively determine whether MSW effects really occur for SN neutrinos or not.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure