How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom? A virtual multilingual classroom with Moodle and...

How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom?

A virtual multilingual classroom with Moodle and Apertium

Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University

Roskilde, December 2008

Linguamón–UOC Chair in Multilingualism

CALPIU 2008

A virtual multilingual classroom

CALPIU 2008


• Table of contents– General framework

• Moodle• Apertium

– Integration• Language detector• Spelling checker

– Linguistic issues– Prototype– Final remarks– Future work

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• Moodle. What is it and what does it offer?– Moodle is a course management system.

• Courses can be followed 100% online.• Easy to install, to maintain and to manage.• Freely distributed.

– The Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has students from at least 45 different countries.

– Challenge: making Moodle multilingual.

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• Apertium. What is it and what does it offer?– Apertium is a free software machine

translation platform. It offers the following tools:

• Language-independent machine translation engine,

• Linguistic data,• Managing tools.

– In this project, Apertium has worked in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.

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• How does it work?– In Apertium, the input must go trough the

following processes:• Unformatting: the input is divided into format

information and text to translate.• Morphological analysis: each word receives

all the possible morphological tags.• Part-of-speech disambiguation: each word

receives only one morphological tag.• Shallow syntactic analysis: a shallow parse

tree of the source sentence is built.

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• How does it work?• Shallow structural transfer: the information of

the parse tree is transferred to an equivalent parse tree.

• Lexical transfer: according to the syntactic information, the most appropriate words are selected.

• Morphological generation: each word is adapted to its context.

• Reformatting: the format information from the input is retrieved and transferred to the target text.

– Apertium's Website:<http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium-

www/>

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• Integration. Description.– Messages are NOT directly translated, as

the performance of the machine translator would not be successful.

• The messages in academic forums have a lot of mistakes (Climent and Moré: 2005).

• This kind of texts has particular features (abbreviations, capital letters, etc.).

– The input text has to go trough a language detector and a pre-edition module before entering into Apertium.

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• How does it work?– The automatic language detector detects

the language of the source text thanks to the TextCat algorithm by Gertjan van Noord.

– The text goes trough a spelling checker, which works as follows:

• Typographical changes using regular expressions.

• Ad-hoc changes according to the user needs.• Changes according to the dictionary of

wordforms and dictionaries selected by the user.

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– Which changes will the spelling checker make?

• It checks if all the words in lower case in the text are contained in one of its dictionaries.

• If they are not, it works as follows:– Deleting one character in every position,– Adding one character in every position,– Changing every character for every possible

character.• Thanks to a statistic method, the algorithm

will select the most probable correction.

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• Linguistic issues.– Following Climent and Moré (2005), we

studied the messages left in the academic forums at the UOC website, in order to analyse the text type.

– Messages show particularities (use of emoticons, @, abbreviations, etc.), do not use standard language and writers do not pay attention when writing.

– We save the corrections (with its paradigms) of the mistakes and habits in the ad-hoc list.

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– We elaborated a statistic of most frequent changes, to know which changes would be more frequent.

Spanish i:í 81– Most mistakes were due to accents.

Treating them before translating avoids:» ingles (sp) -> groins (en))

– The changes made by the spelling checker are not shown in Moodle. They are just used to get a better translation.

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• Prototype– Showing the original text and its

translations in the same window is not friendly in multilingual environments.

– Every Moodle user defines its language settings, so he or she will always see the messages in the selected language.

– A colour system will indicate whether the user is reading an original text or a translation.

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– Default page when choosing English as the user's language.

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– Default page when choosing Spanish as the user's language.

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– Through a role assignment system, corrections of the translations can be made:

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• Final remarks– The virtual multilingual learning

environment is ready to host courses in Catalan, Spanish, English and French, following the users needs.

– The user can read the information in the language he or she prefers, no matter which one and without having to wait.

– A survey among users showed that, in general, they appreciate the multilingual Moodle

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• Future work– Release executable files and user guides.– Support users during a limited period of

time.– Open the integration to other translation

systems.– Integrate the multilingual capacity to

other communication environments (wikis, blogs, etc.).

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• Website of the trial version:– http://cml.uoc.edu

• Distribution website, forum and news on the development:–http://sourceforge.net/projects/

apertium-moodle/

[email protected]

CALPIU 2008


TakMoltes gràcies

Thank youGraciasMerci

Muito obrigadoБольшое спасибо

Mulţumesc Aïtah…

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