[Corpora-List] Data-Driven Learning materials

[Jakub Marecek]

Dear Martin and others,

I imagine the key reason is that such materials are
often rather imperfect and people still in the field
may not be very open to criticism.

By contrast, I am no longer very active in Linguistics,
so I could perhaps afford to point to a textbook I have
been developing some years ago at Masaryk University:

English for the Deaf
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jxm/e4td/

I have been using custom-compiled corpora (of fiction for
young adults for intermediate learners and of academic
prose for the upper intermediate), custom-written tools
for extracting and ranking collocations by a number of
factors (similar to those now used by Adam and Pavel:
difficulty of the words in context, length and type of
the sentence, difficulty of the source of the text on
average etc), polling it into XML, and transforming using
XSL to a number of formats including web-based interactive
e-learning in Moodle, and handouts in PDF:

http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jxm/e4td/screenshots.html
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jxm/e4td/e4td2_handouts.pdf

The abstract describing the project is available at:
http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~jxm/e4td/cod2007.pdf

I have been doing this largely as a volunteer, and I
have now moved to a different field, so I don't really
have any any troubles admitting the materials are very
imperfect -- but perhaps they can serve as a bad
example, at least.

Sincerely
Jakub

-- 
Jakub Marecek, http://cs.nott.ac.uk/~jxm

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
  -- Samuel Beckett

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