Morphological Processing and Computer-Assisted Language Learning
John A. Nerbonne, Duco Dokter, Petra Smit · Computer Assisted Language Learning · 1998
Contrary to most current practice and contrary to the explicit comments of some practitioners, natural language processing (NLP) can now play a valuable role in computer-assisted language learning (CALL). This paper reports on GLOSSER and discusses the position of NLP within CALL using GLOSSER as an example. GLOSSER is an intelligent assistant for Dutch students learning to read in French. It has been fully implemented and tested, and it offers information on approximately 30,000 different words (or rather: lexemes), which may be taken from any text (no special preparation is required). The assistance takes the form of: • information on the grammatical meaning of morphology • entries in a bilingual dictionary • examples of word use taken from over one million words of text (including some bilingual text) The application has received a warm welcome in user-studies, and has been found a useful tool by students. It relies essentially on lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS) disambiguation, lexeme indexing, and bilingual text alignment–all elements of NLP technology.