Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis

A cascaded finite-state parser for syntactic analysis of Swedish

This report describes the development of a parsing system for written Swedish and is focused on a grammar, the main component of the system, semiautomatically extracted from corpora. A cascaded, finite-state algorithm is applied to the grammar in which the input contains coarse-grained semantic class information, and the output produced reflects not only the syntactic structure of the input, but grammatical functions as well. The grammar has been tested on a variety of random samples of different text genres, achieving precision and recall of 94.62% and 91.92% respectively, and average crossing rate of 0.04, when evaluated against manually disambiguated, annotated texts.

Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages

We present the KELLY project and its work on developing monolingual and bilingual word lists for language learning, using corpus methods, for nine languages and thirty-six language pairs. We describe the method and discuss the many challenges encountered. We have loaded the data into an online database to make it accessible for anyone to explore and we present our own first explorations of it. The focus of the paper is thus twofold, covering pedagogical and methodological aspects of the lists’ construction, and linguistic aspects of the by-product of the project, the KELLY database.

Introduction to the special issue on Resources and Tools for Language Learners

This special issue of Language Resources and Evaluation is devoted to Resources and Tools for Language Learners. The use of language resources in the teaching and learning of a foreign language goes back to the middle of the last century: the General Service List published by Michael West in 1953 is one of the first examples of the usefulness of corpus information for language learning. In subsequent decades, corpora and corpus evidence became increasingly exploited for teaching and learning of foreign languages, including annotated frequency lists, corpus-based reference works such as dictionaries, concordances, and grammars, and tools for mining corpora (e.g., procedures for the extraction and analysis of collocations) for linguistic data that can be used in the classroom, CALL programs, and, in more recent years, webbased environments. As a result, a strong link has been forged ‘‘between the two previously disparate fields of corpus linguistics and foreign/second language research’’ (Granger 2002: 4). In addition to methods and results from corpus linguistics, language learning research has benefited in recent years from the availability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools, such as part-of-speech taggers, parsers, and machine learning (ML) techniques, to make raw corpora more useful for language teaching and learning (Borin 2002). In recent years, this research strand has been supported by the development of NLP applications specifically designed for educational purposes; innovative NLP techniques, for example, have been used to develop tools

Literacy Demands and Information to Cancer Patients

This study examines language complexity of written health information materials for patients undergoing colorectal cancer surgery. Written and printed patient information from 28 Swedish clinics are automatically analyzed by means of language technology. The analysis reveals different problematic issues that might have impact on readability. The study is a first step, and part of a larger project about patients’ health information seeking behavior in relation to written information material. Our study aims to provide support for producing more individualized, person centered information materials according to preferences for complex and detailed or legible texts and thus enhance a movement from receiving information and instructions to participating in knowing. In the near future the study will continue by integrating focus groups with patients that may provide valuable feedback and enhance our knowledge about patients’ use and preferences of different information material.