Antonio Pareja-Lora

OntoTag's linguistic ontologies: improving semantic Web annotations for a better language understanding in machines

Following the road in-between purely linguistic annotation and solely ontology-based annotations for the semantic Web, a hybrid (ontological and linguistic) model and platform, called OntoTag, has been created, aiming at better machine communication, interoperability and language understanding; these capabilities are derived from the incorporation into the platform of a set of linguistic ontologies, the main topic of this paper, suitable for the multileveled and standardized annotation of semantic Web documents.

RDF(S)/XML linguistic annotation of semantic web pages

Although with the Semantic Web initiative much research on web page semantic annotation has already been done by AI researchers, linguistic text annotation, including the semantic one, was originally developed in Corpus Linguistics and its results have been somehow neglected by AI. The purpose of the research presented in this proposal is to prove that integration of results in both fields is not only possible, but also highly useful in order to make Semantic Web pages more machine-readable. A multi-level (possibly multi-purpose and multi-language) annotation model based on EAGLES standards and Ontological Semantics, implemented with last generation Semantic Web languages (RDF(S)/XML) is being developed to fit the needs of both communities; the present paper focuses on its semantic level.

The Pragmatic Level of OntoLingAnnot’s Ontologies and Their Use in Pragmatic Annotation for Language Teaching

Recently, linguists have shown great interest in the study of Pragmatics and its associated phenomena, in an attempt to capture the information that is being communicated in a discourse and/or exchanged in a dialogue, especially when this information is not being explicitly stated. With this aim, a pragmatic annotation level has been included in the OntoLingAnnot annotation framework, and the corresponding pragmatic knowledge has been formalized into the linguistic ontologies of this framework. This chapter presents the different units, values, attributes and relations that constitute the pragmatic level of these ontologies, which have been devised for the annotation of dialogues and texts in different contexts (e.g., the development of corpora or language teaching).

New Perspectives on Teaching and Working with Languages in the Digital Era.

Currently, there is an international change in education that includes the development of new learning programmes and policies, such as (a) bilingual education programmes, (b) the Bologna process, with an emphasis on a more autonomous way of learning, or (c) the systematic evaluation and assessment of students and educational results. These changes in the educational situation require changing the way we learn, think and behave. Thus have emerged several new scenarios and environments for teaching and learning, such as blended learning, e-learning, ubiquitous learning or incidental learning. All these new approaches put the focus on learners and are intended to adapt to their needs and limitations. It seems that the easiest way to implement these new approaches is to apply Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to teaching and/or learning. This is the main assumption underlying the research in important language teaching and learning areas, such as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL). This chapter (as well as this whole volume) tries to show how this goal is currently being achieved.