Paola Monachesi

Language technology for elearning

Given the huge amount of static and dynamic content created for eLearning tasks, the major challenge for extending their use is to improve the effectiveness of retrieval and accessibility by making use of Learning Management Systems. The aim of the European project Language Technology for eLearning is to tackle this problem by providing Language Technology based functionalities and by integrating semantic knowledge to facilitate the management, distribution and retrieval of the learning material.

Using social media for ontology enrichment

In order to support informal learning, we complement the formal knowledge represented by ontologies developed by domain experts with the informal knowledge emerging from social tagging. To this end, we have developed an ontology enrichment pipeline that can automatically enrich a domain ontology using: data extracted by a crawler from social media applications, similarity measures, the DBpedia knowledge base, a disambiguation algorithm and several heuristics. The main goal is to provide dynamic and personalized domain ontologies that include the knowledge of the community of users.

Adding Semantic Role Annotation to a Corpus of Written Dutch

We present an approach to automatic semantic role labeling (SRL) carried out in the context of the Dutch Language Corpus Initiative (D-Coi) project. Adapting earlier research which has mainly focused on English to the Dutch situation poses an interesting challenge especially because there is no semantically annotated Dutch corpus available that can be used as training data. Our automatic SRL approach consists of three steps: bootstrapping from a syntactically annotated corpus by means of a rule-based tagger developed for this purpose, manual correction on the basis of the Prop-Bank guidelines which have been adapted to Dutch and training a machine learning system on the manually corrected data.

Using a Domain-Ontology and Semantic Search in an E-Learning Environment

The “Language Technology for eLearning” (LT4EL) project integrates semantic knowledge in a Learning Management System to enhance the management, distribution and especially the cross-lingual retrieval of learning material. One of the results achieved in the project is the construction of a language-independent domain-ontology with lexicons of eight languages linked to it. Learning objects of these languages have been annotated with concepts from this ontology. The ontology management system allows for semantic search which has been proven to be more effective than simple full text search for all languages of the project.

Object clitics and clitic climbing in Italian HPSG grammar

Italian object clitics can be involved in nonlocal dependencies in the sense that they mus t /may appear on a verbal head of which they are not an argument. Two cases where this situation arises will be discussed: the first is due to the presence of an auxiliary verb and the second is triggered by the presence of a certain class of verbs that allows clitic climbing. An analysis will be proposed within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar [Pollard and Sag, 1987; Pollard and Sag, 1993]; it can be shown that an analysis in terms of nonlocal features and the Nonlocal Feature Principle, which is the mechanism provided by HPSG to deal with nonlocal dependencies, does not provide a satisfactory account of the phenomenon; it is too powerful. An alternative approach will be proposed; it is based on the idea that the arguments of a verb which is governed by an auxiliary or clitic climbing trigger verb can be raised to become arguments of the governor by a mechanism that achieves an effect similar to functional composition as developed within the tradition of Categorial Grammar. This approach is able to capture the right generalizations, to account for the relevant data and can be easily extended to account for long NP-movement which is another property of clitic climbing trigger verbs.

Improving the search for learning objects with keywords and ontologies

We report on an ongoing project which aims at improving the effectiveness of retrieval and accessibility of learning object within learning management systems and learning object repositories. The project Language Technology for eLearning approaches this task by providing Language Technology based functionalities and by integrating semantic knowledge through domain-specific ontologies. We will report about the development of a keyword extractor and a domain-specific ontology, the integration of these modules into the learning management system ILIAS and the validation of these tools which assesses their added value in the scenario of searching learning objects across different languages.

Enhancing the learning process: qualitative validation of an informal learning support system consisting of a knowledge discovery and a social learning component

In a Lifelong Learning context, learners often rely on informal learning materials to access and process information. There is a growing interest in accessing educational material on the social web. We have created a system that facilitates learners and tutors in accessing informal knowledge sources in the context of a learning task and describe the results of a summative and formative evaluation of this system. The system consists of a knowledge discovery component and a social learning component. The evaluation shows that with our system informal resources can successfully enhance the learning process within a Lifelong Learning context. The knowledge discovery component assists the learner in identifying relevant concepts, discovering relations between concepts, and mastering the correct vocabulary. In addition the social learning component offers relevant and trusted documents and contacts on the basis of a learners social network.

Ontology Enrichment with Social Tags for eLearning

One of the objectives of this paper is to verify whether it is possible to extract meaningful related tags from a limited set of tagged resources and from resources tagged by only few users. This is the expected situation in a learning community. An additional goal is to assess whether the related tags extracted can be a useful source for enriching an existing domain ontology. A user centered evaluation has been carried out to analyze the effect of the enriched ontology in supporting a learning task in comparison with clusters of related tags. The experiment has been carried out both with beginners and advanced learners.

The Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning Project

This poster presents an ongoing European project: Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning (LTfLL). The aim of the project is to create a next-generation of support and advice services to enhance individual and collaborative building of competences and knowledge creation in educational and organizational settings. The project makes extensive use of Language Technologies and cognitive models in the services to face a number of learning specific problems.

Supporting Formal and Informal Learning through Domain Ontologies

One of the objectives of the Language Technology for LifeLong Learning project is to develop services that facilitate learners and tutors in accessing formal and informal knowledge sources. We show that ontologies enriched with social tags play a crucial role in achieving this goal. Ontologies are central to the knowledge discovery process and they facilitate reuse of course material through semantic search of annotated learning objects, supporting thus formal and informal learning.