Corpus-Based Tools for Computer-Assisted Acquisition of Reading Abilities in Cognate Languages

Svitlana Kurella, Serge Sharoff, Anthony Hartley


Abstract
This paper presents an approach to computer-assisted teaching of reading abilities using corpus data. The approach is supported by a set of tools for automatically selecting and classifying texts retrieved from the Internet. The approach is based on a linguistic model of textual cohesion which describes relations between larger textual units that go beyond the sentence level. We show that textual connectors that link such textual units reliably predict different types of texts, such as “information” and “opinion”: using only textual connectors as features, an SVM classifier achieves an F-score of between 0.85 and 0.93 for predicting these classes. The tools are used in our project on teaching reading skills in a cognate foreign language (L3) which is cognate to a known foreign language (L2).
Anthology ID:
L08-1575
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/479_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Svitlana Kurella, Serge Sharoff, and Anthony Hartley. 2008. Corpus-Based Tools for Computer-Assisted Acquisition of Reading Abilities in Cognate Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Corpus-Based Tools for Computer-Assisted Acquisition of Reading Abilities in Cognate Languages (Kurella et al., LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/479_paper.pdf