Arabic-L:PEDA:aConCorde wants teacher input

[Dilworth Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 21 Jul  2005
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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1) Subject:aConcorde wants teacher input

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1)
Date: 21 Jul  2005
From:eric at comp.leeds.ac.uk (reposted from CLLT)
Subject:aConcorde wants teacher input

[please respond directly to the poster]

Leeds software engineer Andy Roberts is developing a free concordencer,
aConcorde, http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/andyr/software/aConCorde/
index.html Originally developed for Arabic concordancing, it has
English and Arabic interfaces; aConCorde is written in Java, so it
can run on a wide range of platforms, and other open-source Java
packages can be readily integrated.

Andy is interested in adding novel concordance functionality, making use
of other Java modules. However, we need advice from corpus-aware
language
teachers: could these extensions (or others) actually be of any use
in language teaching and learning?  Features such as:

- root/stem concordancing: use an Arabic root/stem analyser (eg
Buckwalter's root/stem wordlist) to display concordances of words
sharing
a common root/stem

- inferred word-clustering: use a Grammatical Inference package to
automatically cluster words in the corpus into groups with similar
syntactic behaviour,  and then display concordances of "similar" words

- corpus-gathering: use a "web-as-corpus" package like Baroni's
Bootcat to allow users to automatically gather a custom-built corpus
from the Web, and then display concordances from this


These may be "solutions looking for a problem": they may be technically
interesting to implement, but pointless unless language techers can see
some useful application in language teaching and learning.


SO ... can any CLLT readers suggest possible classroom uses or exercises
which might benefit from concordances of root/stem, or syntactic
cluster, or web-sourced D-I-Y corpus?

thanks in advance for any suggestions

Eric Atwell (pp Andy Roberts)


-- 
Eric Atwell, Senior Lecturer, Language research group, School of
Computing, Faculty of Engineering, University of Leeds, LEEDS LS2
9JT, England
TEL: +44-113-2335430  FAX: +44-113-2335468  http://
www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric


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End of Arabic-L:  21 Jul  2005