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A virtual multilingual classroom with Moodle and Apertium Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University Roskilde, December 2008 Linguamón–UOC Chair in Multilingualism. How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom?. A virtual multilingual classroom.
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A virtual multilingual classroom with Moodle and Apertium Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University Roskilde, December 2008 Linguamón–UOC Chair in Multilingualism How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom?
A virtual multilingual classroom CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom CALPIU 2008
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Table of contents • General framework • Moodle • Apertium • Integration • Language detector • Spelling checker • Linguistic issues • Prototype • Final remarks • Future work
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Moodle. What is it and what does it offer? • Moodle is a course management system. • Courses can be followed 100% online. • Easy to install, to maintain and to manage. • Freely distributed. • The Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has students from at least 45 different countries. • Challenge: making Moodle multilingual.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Apertium. What is it and what does it offer? • Apertium is a free software machine translation platform. It offers the following tools: • Language-independent machine translation engine, • Linguistic data, • Managing tools. • In this project, Apertium has worked in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • How does it work? • In Apertium, the input must go trough the following processes: • Unformatting: the input is divided into format information and text to translate. • Morphological analysis: each word receives all the possible morphological tags. • Part-of-speech disambiguation: each word receives only one morphological tag. • Shallow syntactic analysis: a shallow parse tree of the source sentence is built.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • How does it work? • Shallow structural transfer: the information of the parse tree is transferred to an equivalent parse tree. • Lexical transfer: according to the syntactic information, the most appropriate words are selected. • Morphological generation: each word is adapted to its context. • Reformatting: the format information from the input is retrieved and transferred to the target text. • Apertium's Website: <http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium-www/>
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Integration. Description. • Messages are NOT directly translated, as the performance of the machine translator would not be successful. • The messages in academic forums have a lot of mistakes (Climent and Moré: 2005). • This kind of texts has particular features (abbreviations, capital letters, etc.). • The input text has to go trough a language detector and a pre-edition module before entering into Apertium.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • How does it work? • The automatic language detector detects the language of the source text thanks to the TextCat algorithm by Gertjan van Noord. • The text goes trough a spelling checker, which works as follows: • Typographical changes using regular expressions. • Ad-hoc changes according to the user needs. • Changes according to the dictionary of wordforms and dictionaries selected by the user.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Which changes will the spelling checker make? • It checks if all the words in lower case in the text are contained in one of its dictionaries. • If they are not, it works as follows: • Deleting one character in every position, • Adding one character in every position, • Changing every character for every possible character. • Thanks to a statistic method, the algorithm will select the most probable correction.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Linguistic issues. • Following Climent and Moré (2005), we studied the messages left in the academic forums at the UOC website, in order to analyse the text type. • Messages show particularities (use of emoticons, @, abbreviations, etc.), do not use standard language and writers do not pay attention when writing. • We save the corrections (with its paradigms) of the mistakes and habits in the ad-hoc list.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • We elaborated a statistic of most frequent changes, to know which changes would be more frequent. • Spanish i:í 81 • Most mistakes were due to accents. Treating them before translating avoids: • ingles (sp) -> groins (en)) • The changes made by the spelling checker are not shown in Moodle. They are just used to get a better translation.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Prototype • Showing the original text and its translations in the same window is not friendly in multilingual environments. • Every Moodle user defines its language settings, so he or she will always see the messages in the selected language. • A colour system will indicate whether the user is reading an original text or a translation.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Default page when choosing English as the user's language.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Default page when choosing Spanish as the user's language.
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Through a role assignment system, corrections of the translations can be made:
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Final remarks • The virtual multilingual learning environment is ready to host courses in Catalan, Spanish, English and French, following the users needs. • The user can read the information in the language he or she prefers, no matter which one and without having to wait. • A survey among users showed that, in general, they appreciate the multilingual Moodle
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Future work • Release executable files and user guides. • Support users during a limited period of time. • Open the integration to other translation systems. • Integrate the multilingual capacity to other communication environments (wikis, blogs, etc.).
CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom • Website of the trial version: • http://cml.uoc.edu • Distribution website, forum and news on the development: • http://sourceforge.net/projects/apertium-moodle/ cborrellc@uoc.edu
Tak Moltes gràcies Thank you Gracias Merci Muito obrigado Большое спасибо Mulţumesc Aïtah… A virtual multilingual classroom CALPIU 2008