Kristina Kocijan

Story of a ‘storyline visualization’ in high school readings

Storyline visualization, as a process of illustrating data that has a course of events via a visual medium, has been used in the area of film making for a very long time. Not so long ago, it has moved from the paper version to the digital word allowing for a wider usage. In this paper we propose its usage as a teaching tool in the area of literature reading for the Croatian class (primary language). We have conducted a preliminary research in five Croatian high schools of a different profile to see how storyline visualization, and visualization of school materials in general, affects students understanding of the material being studied. Each school participated with two groups of students where one group was exposed to the storyline visualization of a novel Prokleta avlija by Ivo Andrić [N=103 in total] during the reading period, and the other one was reading without the visualization [N=93 in total]. We will present our results taking into account students gender and type of a school.

Identification of Croatian Light Verb Constructions with NooJ

This paper deals with the identification of verbal multiword expressions in Croatian using NooJ. We focus on light verb constructions, i.e. constructions consisting of a light verb and a nominal part (e.g. donijeti odluku ‘to make a decision’ or ‘to reach a decision’). The nominal part in light verb constructions (LVCs) can be either a noun phrase (e.g. dati udarac ‘to give a blow’) or a prepositional phrase (staviti na raspolaganje ‘to put at disposal’). Light verbs are entirely or partially deprived of their lexical meaning and the meaning of the whole construction is conveyed by their complimentary NPs or PPs. All elements in these constructions act as a single unit at some level of linguistic analysis, particularly at the level of semantics and, more recently, of syntax.

Detection of Verb Frames with NooJ

This paper deals with semi-automatic extension of CroDeriV with verb valency frames. CroDeriV is a morphological database of Croatian verbs. In its present shape the database comprises 14 500 verbs in infinitive forms. Each verb in CroDeriV is segmented into lexical and derivational morphemes and verbs of the same root are mutually linked. In order to further enrich the CroDeriV with semantic and syntactic information, we have used the NooJ platform to recognize derivationally related verbs, find the verb frames and to speed up the sentence processing.

Recognizing Diminutive and Augmentative Croatian Nouns

In this paper, the authors present NooJ morphological grammars for recognizing Croatian diminutive and augmentative nouns for those common nouns that already exist in the Croatian NooJ dictionary. The purpose of this project is twofold. The first one is to recognize both diminutive and augmentative forms of each noun existing in our dictionary (over 20 000 common nouns) if such a form occurs in a text. The second purpose is to determine types of texts in which these words appear the most (or if they even appear) which is the reason why we divided our corpus in two thematic categories (children literature, novels). The results of our algorithm are high on both types of text [overall P = 0.82; R = 0.80; f-measure = 0.81]. Although NooJ dictionary allows direct entrance of such derivations as an attribute-value description of a main noun, we have opted for the second option, i.e. writing a morphological grammar that will recognize the needed form. In this way, we are saving the space and time needed to add all the existing forms to the noun’s dictionary.