NLP rving the cau of language learning
Frédérique Segond Xerox Rearch Centre Europe 6, chemin de Mauperthuis F-38240 Meylan - FRANCE com
Thibault Parmentier Xerox Rearch Centre Europe 6, chemin de Mauperthuis F-38240 Meylan - FRANCE com
Abstract
E-learning paves the way to a new type of cour, more student centred, granulized, on demand, and highly interactive. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies associated with other multimedia technologies can help to address the major issues raid by this new type of cours: interaction, personalization and reliable information access. This paper prents Exills, a true e-learning solution which integrates natural language processing tools and virtual reality1. Exills is unique in that,, unlike most of the language learning systems, it focus on improving learners’ performance rather than learners’ competence.
Introduction
英语小报资料This paper is not a theoretical paper. It describes a true e-learning system that concentrates on improving urs’ performance in a foreign language and integrates natural language processing technologies.
The system, Exills () reprents an innovative way of integrating Natural Language technologies and multimedia technologies in order to provide a visionary e-learning tool for learning foreign languages.
Exills is the result of a clo collaboration between language teachers, specialists in virtual reality, linguists and computer scientists. While retaining “traditional content” such as language exercis, grammar worksheets and speech acts, Exills takes advantage of new technologies for interaction (asynchronous and synchronous), game aspect and cour scenarization.
Exills has been conceived with the constant concern for pedagogical quality and for differentiating itlf from both CDROMs and face to face language cours. We have been careful to 1 The software we u for Virtual reality comes from Blaxxun (/en/site/index.html). renounce using technologies, even innovative ones,
if they did not rve the cau of a pedagogical e-learning system. The focus has been to improve le
arner’s performance rather than to insist on improving learner’s competence2. Indeed, experimenting with different available language learning solutions focusing on competence (via vocabulary exercis and grammar) led us to the conclusion that the types of activities do not insure that learners are then able to interact in a foreign language. While they might acquire the conceptual knowledge of the language they are not necessarily able to u it in practical contexts. In the ca of Exills, learners are put into practical situations. The situations are reprented via different scenarios. In most cas the scenario corresponds to everyday work situations.
Exills focus on the interaction aspect of language learning driven by the u of the Internet,
in particular, on interaction and information access.
Interaction within Exills includes language understanding through reading and listening. It also improves language production in writing. As we will e in the conclusion adding speech technologies to Exills will enable urs to also improve on language oral production.
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In the demonstration scenarios that are accessible online, targeted urs are professionals with an intermediate level in English or French. The scenarios put urs in typical work situations such as introducing themlves, reading emails, arching for and understanding information, writing and ma
king a prentation, ordering their meal, interacting with their colleagues and customers. Part of the scenario is dedicated to the discovery of cultural aspects.
2 Competence and performance as defined by
Chomsky (Chomsky, 1965): Competence is
the speaker-hearer's knowledge of his
language. Performance is the speaker-
hearer's actual u of his language in
concrete situations
In what follows, after prenting our view of e-learning, we describe Exills and its different technical components. We then conclude by suggesting other linguistic technologies that could rve the cau of language e-learning.
How e-learning affects our way of learning Learning through the Internet, or e-learning, paves the wa
y for a new type of cour which, most of the time, complements the face-to-face cour (blended learning), but can also be substituted for the face-to-face cours. While traditional and Computer-Bad training is targeted to a group of students, e-learning is often referred to as “my-learning” as it is highly personalized, granulized, on demand and highly interactive. The characteristics of e-learning are that it provides learners with the possibility to learn exactly what they need, from anywhere and at any time
E-learning completely changes both the teaching and the learning process. Teachers become tutors that support students’ work. Students take more responsibility in the learning process as they know what they need to learn to be efficient. This is especially true in a life long training context. They become actors in their learning process by choosing their cour topics, elaborating their learning paths, exchanging with other students as well as with tutors.
E-learning is definitively a new way of learning that can take advantage of new Internet technologies.
However, despite the explosion of e-learning platforms also called LMS for learning management system (e thot.cursus.edu) there are very few systems which take real advantage of the functionalities the Internet offers such as: interaction, personalization and huge information access (for both students and tutors). Indeed, most
of the current e-learning solutions are LMS that are former Knowledge Management Systems customized for learning. Becau they have not firstly been designed for a learning purpo they often miss the pedagogical dimension. Other solutions are a simple web link to already existing CD-ROM content. This solution usually offers a simple type of interaction such as emails with the tutors and, sometimes, forums with other students.
Within the e-learning domain, language learning is one of the most successful market gments as it comes cond only to IT and marketing. This is probably due to the fact that for many years it has been possible to learn a language using electronic media (CD-ROM). Medium to large publishers have been successful in developing language training multimedia content of good quality. Still, the majority of so-called e-language learning solutions that are on the market today are CD-ROM content transferred onto the web rather that real online solutions.
The reason is probably that most of the publishers in this area are specialists in producing good quality pedagogical content but are not specialists of the Internet, nor do they have the technological resources necessary to transfer their content onto the Web. Offering on-line content on the web is very different from offering content on a CD-ROM. The media organize content in a completely different way and this has a strong impact on the basic pedagogical principles. This shows up at diffe
rent levels. For instance, studies have shown that urs will spend at the most 15 minutes on an Internet learning ssion versus 45 minutes on a CD-ROM. learning. Besides, there is the issue of how to organize learning material so that navigation among short learning modules is possible without affecting the learning pedagogical process. Finally, record keeping, tracking, tracing and flexibility are all esntial functions for making an on line cour successful as well as for keeping ur motivation high. The are just a few of the issues that need to be addresd when creating high quality content on the Internet for language learning.
Exills is a true e-learning solution, that on the technological part, integrates virtual reality with linguistic and collaborative technologies as well as with a smart arch engine.
Exills’ general features
In very general terms, Exills could be described as a hybrid between an authoring tool and a delivery platform particularly well suited to building and distributing language learning applications.
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Exills ur interface provides interactive access to the most up-to-date Internet technologies.
The ur interface is compod of:
• a 3D scene to put the ur in a cognitive context in line with the topic of the cour;
• a chat frame to allow students, robots and tutors to interact via text (written
production);
• a frame to provide learners with any information they might need as well as with
activities to do.
• a toolbar to provide learners with easy access to specific functionalities such as: a
linguistic toolbox (contextual dictionary
look up, phonetic spell checker, conjugation
engine), a notepad to take notes, a history of their work to review it at any time, as well as shortcuts, through maps, to navigate inside 3D scenes. They can also get help from tutors, access their profile and a list of personalized exercis, grammar worksheets, and speech acts. Each cour is associated with a scenario. The
scenarios are usually associated with a mission to
accomplish. This mission integrates learning
activities, game aspects and competition between
students. In order to achieve the mission, learners
need to interact with each other, with the tutor as
well as with the virtual environment. Thanks to the virtual reality this interaction takes place like in video games. Learners play a video game in a foreign language.
In its current incarnation Exills has the
following underlying features.
在线中英文转换器
Learner
Figure 1: Technologies involved Virtual reality
While virtual reality prents real advantages for learning, this technology is not yet strongly ud for this purpo.
In Exills, virtual reality is ud both for interaction and for personalization. Personalization, becau when they are in virtual reality, learners can choo a reprentation of themlves, also known as an avatar , and can move around the virtual places like in the real world. For instance, learners can meet with other avatars/learners, interact with them and access the Internet.
The virtual reality induces a type ofokay是什么意思
interaction that completely differs from email, forum or face to face. Part of this difference is due to the fact that people hide themlves behind an avatar but also becau of the game aspect permitted by the virtual reality.
First experiments showed that in virtual
reality, as in games, people behave completely differently and tend to interact much more. For instance, we have noticed that while in a face to face or in a video cour, most of the time, only the most confident students speak up; in a virtual environment, everyone dares more to express himlf/herlf. This definitively helps the tutor in evaluating students’ ability.
To ea and push learners’ interaction, it is
important to provide them with an interaction
topic. This is where the notion of scenario comes in and where, again, virtual reality turns out to be an important technology. The scenario is there to help students to interact among themlves but also to immer them directly into “prototypical situations”. For instance, if students need to learn a language for work reasons, a scenario will be built
around their everyday life at work, including the
physical work place and this induces reaction and
discussion correlated to the 3D scenes. Becau it
provides learners with a reason to interact, like in
role playing games, the scenario makes interaction
more effective than in traditional chat and forums.
Figure 2: Set the student in a cognitive context using the 3D.
What is more natural than clicking on a computer screen to access emails, than clicking on a CD to hear music, than visiting a library to read books or than being invited to chat with the receptionist when arriving at the reception desk? Becau it mimics the real world, students can enter quickly into the virtual reality environment. Students usually just need a few hours’ training to easily manipulate the mou in order to move from one virtual place to another. Linguistic technologies
Exills adds other technologies to enhanced virtual reality in such a way that the resulting learning system makes real u of the potential of the Internet.
In its current incarnation, Exills offers learners contextual bilingual dictionaries, morphological analyzers and syntactic taggers, a language identifier and phonetic spell checkers. The technologies are there to help students express themlves or understand a foreign language. Linguistic technologies associated with virtual reality retain the personalized aspect of individual cours while being immerd in the collective cour.
Within the chat, Exills offers a comprehension help rvice which us the context to first retrieve the most appropriate translation of a word (syntactic and mantic disambiguation). As a
result, the students’ comprehension is sped up and interaction becomes smoother.
The same contextual dictionary look up could be ud for providing the student with a list of ntences where the word they don’t understand appears with the same meaning. In that ca, the pedagogical process is different: instead of providing the student directly with the translation, the system provides him/her with other contextual us of the same word
Figure 3: Understanding assistance.
If we now consider the linguistic analysis of
student production (chat/forum contribution,
exerci, writing, etc.), linguistic technologies
provide students with customizable rvices which
allow them to par and tag their own production
in order to check its correctness. Here again the
hantavirusgoal is not to provide them with the correct answer,
this is left to the tutor, but rather to help them
detect their own mistakes.
Figure 4: Through linguistic rvices, students can
analyze and correct their written production.
Along the same lines as “learning by example”,
linguistic tools can be ud to highlight specific
language constructions such as functional relations,
terminology or idiomatic expressions.
Derivational morphology can be ud to discover
the words of a same family and improve students’
vocabulary.
A simple morphological analyzer gives students
access to verb conjugations or noun declensions.
Figure 5: Access to the conjugation of a verb
Exills also includes a language identifier to
force students to interact only in the language they
are learning. This integration relieves the tutor of
checking on each student, and pushes students to
express themlves more in that language.
The language identifier is integrated into the
chat. This module identifies the language ud by a
student and if different from the one the student is
suppod to learn, the system blocks any type of
interaction. Students then receive a message saying
that they are not using the appropriate language.
The language identifier can also be plugged into
mail or forum rvices between students or even
between students and tutor.
Figure 6: Automatic control of the language ud
in the chat.
A phonetic spell checker is also available to
students to help them to learn the correct spelling
of words.
Linguistic technologies can be ud to reinforce
the personalization aspect of e-learning. Indeed,
linguistic technologies open the way to learning on
any text that is of interest for the cour and for
each individual learner. For instance, professionals
认证标志can work on their everyday technical
documentation and can learn their professional
terminology in a foreign language. In particular,
linguistic technologies can automatically extract
technical terminology for them.
Smart arch engines
Exills us smart arch engines in order to
strengthen the personalization and interactive
aspects. Indeed, having a smart arch engine that
can take into account students’ needs and interest
through a detailed ur profile and can retrieve personalized content from the web clearly improves the personalization aspect and cour efficiency. Tutors and students can u the Internet as an infinite source of information to enrich cour content. This is where collaborative technologies play a crucial role. Information on the Internet varies in quality, and it is especially important in a cour context to be able to parate the wheat from the chaff.
Smart arch engines strengthen the personalization aspect of e-learning. They can retrieve documents that match the ur’s profile. This ur profile encompass student-specific difficulties in the cours as well as the student’s personal interest, be it for work reasons or in life in general. An example of this is a student who is interested in American politics and has difficulties with the u of idiomatic expressions in French. A smart arch engine us morpho-syntactic analysis of the retrieved text as well as an ontology
to provide the student with texts about American politics that contain idioms. Using smart meta-arch engines permits a arch on the Intranet as well as on student emails. This is especially uful
in a context of professional language learning cours. In that ca, the arch can be performed on technical texts from the company.
Figure 7: Correlated u of a content aggregation engine and of a community manager tools. Collaborative technologies
Within Exills, collaborative technologies are ud to filter information found on the web by commenting and interacting on it. At the end of the interaction process, the tutor will decide which documents will be retained to enrich the content of the cour.
Using collaborative technologies impacts the two kinds of urs in veral ways.
•First, the students. Using this tool and contributing to its content allows the student
community to have access to a very
qualified and annotated text databa.
•Second, the tutors. Tutors can u the community repository in two different ways:
first, to get specific and adequate content in
order to generate new exercis or activities;
cond, to evaluate the level and the
understanding of the students by analyzing
their comments on the different documents
posted.
Infinite number of possible scenarios
The Exills scenario that is currently available on the Internet relates to professionals working for a printing company. It is just one of many possible scenarios. In fact, Exills permits the construction of an infinite number of scenarios. This possibility also points out the high pedagogical adaptability of Exills which leaves to the tutor the possibility to decide about scenario, content and activities. In the next ctions we give some examples of other possible scenarios that could u Exills as an underlying framework.
Schoolsicon是什么意思
In an academic context, it is possible to organize virtual travel for students, similar to language exch
anges that already exist. In that, ca pupils from two different countries connect at the same time and organize a virtual tour of their school, their district, their city, they describe their cultural habits. In this type of experiment one class plays the role of the tutor and corrects the language of the other class.
This kind of experimentation is known as ‘Tandem’ in the pedagogical domain. According to veral studies, this way of learning languages is more efficient as pupils are more motivated.
Life long training
One important pedagogical conquence of the notion of scenario is that it allows urs to learn both a work process and a foreign language.
Another scenario, we are currently working on, is targeted to people working at hotels reception desk. This scenario is developed in the framework of an eContent European project, Thetis (www.thetis-project/), which groups together a language publisher (Q group3), a training company specialized in tourism (Grupo 3 /
GDT4) and a rearch center (Xerox Rearch Centre Europe5).
To summarize, while using linguistic technologies, students can process online texts on the fly and can work on their own documents. This strengthens the personalization aspect of the solution. Going forward, using Exills in a professional context allows students to work on the documents of their own company.
Evaluation
Exills has been tested in different contexts. We tested the current scenario (professional working for a printing company) in language schools as well as in companies. In all cas we have spent two hours beforehand with the tutors to train them with the concept as well as with virtual reality. Between the training of the tutor and the real test we allowed one week so that tutors can get familiar with the environment. We attended the testing just to help in ca of technical problems. We distributed a questionnaire at the end so that urs can immediately provide us with feedback. The feedback was globally highly positive. Urs like the game aspect, although sometime they would prefer a non professional scenario. Becau of this game dimension they tend to u the linguistic technologies more than usual and in particular the contextual bilingual dictionary look-up. This demonstrates that the wish to interact combined with the impossibility of speaking any other languages, becau of the language identifier, push them to u linguistic technologies to progress.
Teachers like the language identifier as it relieves them of checking on the language students u. They report on the fact that correcting on the fly is sometimes difficult becau the chat is so quick between participants. In any ca they do have the possibility of correcting any student production afterwards as everything is stored on the rver.
The other context where we tested Exills is within classrooms. In that ca urs were teenagers from age 13 to 14. This type of population is obviously very comfortable with virtual reality and the game aspect. Again they enjoy very much the fact that they learn a language while playing a game, and again they made extensive u of the linguistic technologies to be able to write ntences. School teachers were impresd by the fact that their students stayed attentive for the entire cour. This should
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/ probably be balanced by the novelty aspect of the system.
One thing we have not yet been able to test, but which would be very interesting to evaluate, is the difference in urs performance in language after having ud Exills.
We are now working with a rearch team of specialists in pedagogical issue to define a methodology that could measure this performance. Conclusion
To summarize, Exills integrates virtual reality, linguistic, collaborative and smart arch technologies into a true e-learning solution that can be ud both synchronously and asynchronously. Thanks to this technology integration Exills allows:
•Students to benefit from the interest’s potential for interaction, , to have a
controlled and efficient access to the
information on the Internet, to learn by
themlves at their own rhythm.
•Tutors to get support in supervising their students.
delphi是什么•Learning companies to offer cours bad on a new concept (virtual reality and
linguistic technologies) instead of just
putting classical lessons on the web.
•End-ur companies to have a cour completely customized to their needs, their
working environment and their terminology. Exills is a true e-learning solution created to take advantage of the web. By taking advantage of the interaction, Exills escapes the drawbacks of many e-learning solutions such as: the strenuousness of reading notices, the impression for students of being left to their own devices, or the temptation to give up the cour. This is made possible becau:
•Virtual reality induces a cognitive context for the students and pushes them to interact.
•Smart arch technologies allow one get information, texts and documents from the
Internet or specialized databas related to a
specific subject matching the language level
of the student.
•Collaborative technologies allow the sharing of information gathered on the Internet
between students and the provision of
adequate content to the tutor to create new
teppei
exercis or lessons almost on the fly.
•Linguistic tools provide autonomy to students by showing them concepts, give
