Free ebook available: Breaking the Language Barrier: A Game-Changing Approach v0.18

[Ziyuan Yao]

Dear All,

I'm pleased to announce my free ebook "Breaking the Language Barrier:
A Game-Changing Approach", version 0.18. The ebook has undergone
significant updates since its initial release (version 0.09 in April
2010). Almost every part has significant new developments, so I
suggest existing readers take it anew.

Perhaps nothing can explain this ebook better than its own Overview
and Table of Contents, which are attached below.

View or download it (free) from:
https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/publications/books/breaking-the-language-barrier-a-game-changing-approach

Best Regards,
Ziyuan Yao
https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/

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Overview

In today's world, the goal of breaking the language barrier is pursued
on two fronts: language teachers teaching students a second language,
thus enabling humans to manually break the language barrier, and
computational linguists building increasingly better machine
translation systems to automatically break the language barrier.

However, I see important, unfulfilled opportunities on both fronts:

In second language teaching, amazingly efficient teaching methods have
not gone mainstream and not drawn enough attention from computational
linguists (so that these methods could be automated and truly
powerful). For example, imagine if you're browsing a Web page in your
native language, and a Web browser extension automatically detects the
topic of this page and inserts relevant foreign language micro-lessons
in it, so that you can incidentally learn a foreign language while
browsing interesting native language information :-) This AdSense-like
"L1-driven L2 teaching" will be the future of second language
teaching.

In machine translation, computational linguists only pay attention to
computer capabilities to process natural language (known as natural
language processing, NLP), and totally ignore human capabilities to
share some burden from the computer in language processing, which can
lead to significantly better results. For example, theory and practice
have proven that syntax disambiguation is a much harder task than word
sense disambiguation, and therefore machine translation tends to screw
up the word order of the translation result if the language pair has
disparate word orders; but what if machine translation preserves the
source language's word order in the translation result, and teaches
the end user about the source language's word order so that he can
manually figure out the logic of the translation result? If the end
user is willing to commit some of his own natural intelligence in the
man-machine joint effort to break the language barrier, he will get
the job done better.

Therefore this ebook presents emerging ideas and implementations in
computer-assisted language learning (CALL), reading, writing and
machine translation (MT) that strive to leverage both human and
machine language processing potential and capabilities, and will
redefine the way people break the language barrier.

Approaches whose titles have an exclamation mark (!) are stirring
game-changing technologies which are the driving forces behind this
initiative.

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Table of Contents

Overview    3
Chapter 1: Breaking the Language Barrier with Language Learning    4
1.1. Foreign Language Acquisition    4
1.1.1. L1-Driven L2 Teaching! (L1DL2T)    4
1.1.1.1. The Idea    4
1.1.1.2. Historical Developments    6
1.1.1.3. An Example System Design    8
1.1.1.3.1. Overview    8
1.1.1.3.2. ATLAS Mission Profiles    9
1.1.1.3.3. ATLAS User Profiles    15
1.1.1.3.4. Data Acquisition Strategies    17
1.1.2. Word Mnemonics    17
1.1.2.1. Essential Mnemonics    18
1.1.2.1.1. Phonetically Intuitive English! (PIE)    18
1.1.2.1.2. Etymology and Free Association    22
1.1.2.1.3. Why Are They Essential? A Proof    23
1.1.2.2. Other Mnemonics    24
1.1.2.2.1. Orthographically Intuitive English (OIE)    24
1.1.2.2.2. Progressive Word Acquisition (PWA)    25
1.1.2.3. Principles Learned    26
1.2. Foreign Language Writing Aids    27
1.2.1. Predictive vs. Corrective Writing Aids    27
1.2.2. Input-Driven Syntax Aid! (IDSA)    27
1.2.3. Input-Driven Ontology Aid! (IDOA)    28
1.3. Foreign Language Reading Aids    28
Chapter 2: Breaking the Language Barrier with Little Learning    30
2.1. Foreign Language Understanding    30
2.1.1. Syntax-Preserving Machine Translation! (SPMT)    30
2.2. Foreign Language Generation    32
2.2.1. Formal Language Machine Translation! (FLMT)    33