Tools
IR4LL - Information Retrieval for Language Learning
Information Retrieval for Language Learning is the outcome of a Master's Thesis by Niels Ott. Currently, there is a prototype implementation and framework allowing to find texts on the web that do not only contain the information you need but that are also at a certain level of language difficulty.
The goal of this project is to provide language teachers with quick access to suitable reading materials for in-class use and to allow language learners to find interesting readings that they actually can understand.
The current status is the one of an early prototype. In particular, there is no crawler yet. This fact renders some or most of the hits returned by the search engine unusable as the index becomes more and more outdated. Furtunately, a web crawler is currently under development.
RFTagger Java Interface
Popular TreeTagger meets its dignified successor, RFTagger. In order to use this tagger effectively and efficiently in Java programs, the RFTagger Java interface has been developed. This tool allows to run RFTagger on all three major platforms on the command line, and to use it in any Java project as a library. Furthermore, RFTagger Java Interface provides a number of additions, of which two are especially mentionable:
- Additional output of STTS tags ensures compatibility to other NLP tools for German.
- A port of the of the original Perl-based lemmatizer for German shipped with the original allows to fully replace TreeTagger by RFTagger.
Contact: Ramon Ziai
TAGARELA - Teaching Aid for Grammatical Awareness, Recognition and Enhancement of Linguistic Abilities
TAGARELA is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to be fully integrated into university-level Portuguese language courses. It can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook that provides students with opportunities to practice their reading, listening, and writing skills. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access.
TAGARELA was subsequently re-implemented in the UIMA framework by Ramon Ziai in the context of his Master's thesis. The new version retains the full functionality of the first TAGARELA and offers the following new capabilities:
- True extensible annotation-based processing
- Adaptation to activities based on information from the activity model
- Adaptation of feedback for individual students based on basic student modeling
Contact: Ramon Ziai
WELCOME - the Web-Based Learner Corpus Machine
WELCOME is a corpus collection tool currently under development in the project A4 of the Sonderforschungsbereich 833. It enables the distributed collection of structured corpora, such as the learner corpus collected in A4. WELCOME is web-based and thus can be used from any computer with a recent browser.
- WELCOME Interface for Ohio State University (No longer maintained systems)
- WELCOME Interface for Kansas University (No longer maintained systems)
Contact: Ramon Ziai
WERTi - Working with English Texts interactively
WERTi is an intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) system designed to provide supplementary language learning activity resources to ESL students. It can be viewed as an intelligent automatic workbook, providing an unlimited number of activities designed to foster awareness of English grammatical forms and functions. Because it is a web-based system, it can be used anywhere there is a computer with internet access.
Contact: Detmar Meurers