Locating and reusing sundry NLP flotsam in an e-learning application

We describe the background and motivation for an e-learning project—IT-based Collaborative Learning in Grammar—where NLP resource reuse has become an important issue. The resources are of several kinds: POS-tagged and syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks), parsing systems and grammar writer’ s workbenches, and visulization and manipulation tools for linguistically annotated corpora. Our experience thus far has been that although there are a number of such resources available e.g. on the Web, as a rule, numerous incompatibilities and lack of standardization at all levels—markup formats, linguistic annotation schemes, grammatical framework, software APIs, etc.—make the reuse of these resources into a non-trivial endeavor. 0. Preamble: the Setting It is generally acknowledged that the goal of teaching grammar—especially at the university level—should not primarily be that students memorize definitions of concepts and grammatical constructions, but rather that they understand and learn to recognize different structural patterns. This can hardly be achieved without giving students practical training in the skill of grammatical analysis. Research has shown that hands-on problem-solving is more stimulating and thought-provoking than when the information and results are handed down to the pupils during lectures. Further, our experience has been that students learn about grammatical constructions and phenomena more actively when these constructions are discussed by comparing the system found in their native language with that of another language. An added factor contributing to an active student participation is the choice of the material forming the basis for exercises and group activities, which should preferably be as natural as possible. With these pedagogical considerations in mind, we formulated a project for realizing a new format for teaching courses in grammar in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics (the ability to reason about grammar and to carry out grammatical analyses of language utterances being necessary prerequisites for all linguistic studies of language and thereby part of the core curriculum of these subjects). In the proposed format interactive practical training and corpus-based exercises comprise an integral part of the students’ learning process, giving them the opportunity and incentive to participate more actively in their own learning process. Using IT as a tool for collaborative work allows the students to choose the problem-solving strategy which suits them best, as well as the time and place to work on the problem. A corpus of natural language material for grammatical analysis contributes to a more active participation, as it not only presents the grammatical constructions in their context, but also gives students a greater freedom to approach the material and conduct the investigation from a perspective which suits their individual learning styles. A text corpus consists of naturally occurring language in its natural physical context, since it is made up of complete texts or large text fragments, as opposed to the made-up or isolated single sentences or phrases often used to illustrate grammatical points in linguistics textbooks. This accompanying physical context makes it possible to investigate the textual, discourse-level, functions of the grammatical phenomena. An outline of the proposed training material is presented below. It has a modular architecture, composed of four types of modules (see Figure 1, below):