Georges Antoniadis

NLP-based scripting for CALL activities

This article focuses on the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). After identifying the inherent limitations of NLP-free tools, we describe the general framework of Mirto, an NLP-based authoring platform under construction in our laboratory, and organized into four distinct layers: functions, scripts, activities and scenarios. Through several examples, we explain how Mirtos architecture allows to implement state-of-the-art NLP functions, integrate them into easily handled scripts in order to create, without computing skills, didactic activities that could be recorded in more complex sequences or scenarios.

Contribution to semantic analysis of Arabic language

We propose a new approach for determining the adequate sense of Arabic words. For that, we propose an algorithm based on information retrieval measures to identify the context of use that is the closest to the sentence containing the word to be disambiguated. The contexts of use represent a set of sentences that indicates a particular sense of the ambiguous word. These contexts are generated using the words that define the senses of the ambiguous words, the exact string-matching algorithm, and the corpus. We use the measures employed in the domain of information retrieval, Harman, Croft, and Okapi combined to the Lesk algorithm, to assign the correct sense of those proposed.

Use of NLP Tools in CALL System for Arabic

This article focuses on the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). First, we have developed some NLP tools: a labelled dictionary of Arabic (as complete as possible), a generator for morphological derivatives, a Conjugator and a morphological analyzer for Arabic. Second, we used these tools to create a number of educational applications for learning the Arabic language by using the proposed system SALA (an NLP-based authoring system, organized into three distinct layers: functions, scripts and activities).