Tools and resources (not only) for French, Italian and Spanish

Tools and resources (not only) for French, Italian and Spanish Thomas Koller NCLT seminar series, 22.11.2005

Overview Plurilingual learning Existing resources Created resources Developed tools Software architecture

Plurilingual learning • Exploits learners’ knowledge of similar languages • Raises language awareness by showing similar properties in several languages • Aims to avoid learners’ typical errors related to transfer processes

Plurilingual learning: Fields of similarity • Pan-Romance vocabulary (dormir, sang, vin) • 39 words in all languages • 141 words in 8-9 languages • 227 words in 5-7 languages • Sound correspondences • sp. ñ→ fr. / it. gn, n : señor, campaña → seigneur, campagne / signore, campagnaaño → an / anno • Morphosyntactic elements

Plurilingual learning: Example paternal Pater su- de la El Il Le padre padre père habla parla parle con con avec su suo son hijo figlio fils de la della de l’ escuela scuola école Schule school fi l- parl-

Existing resources: Linguistic tools • POS tagger • TreeTagger • SVMTool (Spanish, English, Catalan) • IBM JFrost lemmatiser • provides possible base forms + POS • morphological information (no POS tagging) • Verb conjugator • English, German, French, Italian and Spanish • generates all forms for all tenses

Existing plurilingual resources • Pan-Romance wordlist: 840 words eau agua acqua -- utiliser utilizar utilizzare • Profile words: 340 words avec con con -- presque casi quasi • Sound correspondences: • Italian → Spanish: 19 chi- → ll- chiamare → llamar • Italian → French: 19 -ott- → -uit- notte → nuit • Spanish → Italian: 23 -ue- → -uo- bueno → buono • Spanish → French: 31 ll- → pl- llorar → pleurer • French → Italian: 17 qu- → ch- que → che • French → Spanish: 27 -ein → -eno plein → lleno

Existing resources • Bilingual wordlists • wordlists can easily be converted into • different XML formats • relational databases • used to create multilingual XML lexicons • Plurilingual lexicon • French, Italian, Spanish (Portuguese, Romanian) • 1800 entries

Existing resources: Plurilingual lexicon • [1]actuar, [2]tratarseagir [v] {1 intransitif, 2 pronominal impers.}[1]agire, [2]trattarsi • [caldo->'bouillon'], calientechaud [adj] caldo • contar[+'raconter']compter [v]contare [+'raconter']

Created resources • Multilingual XML lexicon • 43 topics • French: 11,500 lemmas / 14,900 entries • Italian: 13,400 lemmas / 17,800 entries • Spanish: 14,600 lemmas / 19,700 entries • English: 17,600 lemmas / 25,900 entries • German: 5,200 lemmas / 7,300 entries • POS: nouns (m, n, f), verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, prepositions, interjections, numerals • Language levels: 1 - 4

Multilingual XML lexicon: sample entry

Created resources: verb lexicons • Verb lexicons with 500 verbs for each language containing verb pattern information • accepter <vt> <v pron> • [de + INF] • [de faire qch] • [par] • [qch de qn] • [que]

Created resources: verb lexicons Full-form verb lexicons for 1500 – 1700 verbs échappe échapper:pres:1s échapper:pres:3s échapper:subj_pres:1s échapper:subj_pres:3s échapper:impe:2s abandonner 1s_abandonne 2s_abandonnes 3s_abandonne 1p_abandonnons 2p_abandonnez 3p_abandonnent

Overview Developed tools Animated grammar presentations Dictionary tools Plurilingual analysis module

Animated grammar presentations • Dynamic representation of grammatical properties / processes • Tailor-made presentations • Replacing indications of place • Emphasising the subject • Irregular verb conjugations • Spatial prepositions and movements • Authoring tool for creation of slide-based learning materials with animated content • produces slide-based learning materials • animated and/or static text can be included

Authoring tool: Presenter • Can be embedded in web page or used as standalone tool in Windows • XML data can be created automatically and then fed into the presenter→ suitable for flexible feedback • Several XML files can be provided for use in one page and then e.g. chosen via PHP or JavaScript

Dictionary tools • Input: any text in French, Italian or Spanish • Provide word-by-word translations • Multilingual dictionary tool • Tense, number, person for verb forms • POS • Topic • Plurilingual dictionary tool • Similar word forms • Profile words

Multilingual dictionary: Resources • Used resources • Multilingual XML lexicons, multilingual MySQL database • Full-form verb lexicons • Dictionary tool can easily be used with any other data base • special language dictionaries • monolingual definition dictionaries

Plurilingual dictionary: Tools and resources • TreeTagger provides most likely POS • Pan-Romance wordlist and list of profile words • Tool makes use of • sound correspondences • Levenshtein string similarity measure • multilingual MySQL database to automatically detect graphically similar words with the same meaning

Plurilingual dictionary: Word detection • Basically all words of target language with “distance” ≤ 2 are displayed • Sp.posibilidad-- Fr.possibilité→ Normal distance: 4 • Sound correspondence: Sp. -dad -- Fr. -té→ Intermediate form: posibilité • Distance between intermediate form and French form is now only 1

Plurilingual analysis module • Exploits similar sentence structures in Romance languages • Able to analyse learner input up to (paragraphs of) simple sentences and to give detailed feedback

Resources • JFrost: • possible lemmas + POS • (extended morphological information) • Verb lexicons • Hand-crafted grammar

Parser type subject object Robust island parser V V P V Hoy la madre no ha vuelto a hablar con su hijo. Verb group Verb group: • has a fixed position and extension in the sentence • only contains verbs and certain POS sentence is splitted at potential verb groups only parts before and after verb group are actually parsed

Analysis module: Recognised errors • Agreement errors • inside NPs • between sentence components • Subcategorisation errors • too many/few sentence components • wrong preposition • wrong infinite verb form • Position errors • Negation • Adverbs • ...

Error recognition • Constraint relaxation • no constraints during parsing • suite of tests after parsing • Agreement • Position of adverbs • Correctness of Verb group • Error rules

Modules • Grammar reader • Reads in grammar file • Extrapolates phrase structure rules NP -> (det) n (AP) • Provides direct access to subparts of the grammar”give me all NP rules for Spanish” • Verb group divider • Divides sentence at its verbal group • Returns the sentence chunks before and after the VG • NP finder • Finds all possible NP occurrences in sentence chunks • Returns positions of NPs in sentence chunks

Interaction of software components XML Server Client XML PHP Perl Java Shared Object MySQL Flash NLP NLP Web page PDF

Software architecture: Pros • Uniform representation on several platforms, browser-independent • Easy integration of different media types (audio, video, images, animation) • Embed fonts for many character sets (Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) • Flash Remoting: sending complex data structures (Java objects, arrays, hashes) to and from server

Software architecture: Pros • Flash files can interact mutually via JavaScript, LocalConnection class or using the same Local Shared Objects • Local Shared Objects provide the opportunity to save structured data (e.g. XML data) on the client side • No reload necessary for incoming server data • Can read XML files, you can use XPath and regular expressions

Software architecture: Cons • (Requires browser plug-in) • Steep learning curve at the beginning • Contents cannot be read by search engines • Software is not for free

Tools and resources (not only) for French, Italian and Spanish