FLAX: Flexible Language Acquisition with Open Data-Driven Learning
Download as PPT, PDF2 likes968 views
This document discusses the FLAX Language System, an open-source tool for open data-driven language learning. It describes the research collaboration behind FLAX and how it uses corpus-based approaches and open educational resources to build interactive language collections. Examples are given of domain-specific law collections in FLAX, which include different media types and are designed for non-expert language learners and teachers. Research is also discussed on evaluating the impact of FLAX collections and on developing the interface between open resources and academic English.
FLAX: Flexible Language Acquisition with Open Data-Driven Learning
- 1. Wow! The FLAX Language System So Much Open Data Shaoqun Wu Alannah Fitzgerald Ian Witten
- 2. Vici LinkedUp Challenge @ISWC • Open Data-Driven Language Learning with FLAX – Open-Source Tools, Open Resources & Practices – Design-Based Research with the FLAX Project • Research with Corpus-Based Approaches – Critical Reflection by Language Teachers with Open Do-It-Yourself Language Collections in FLAX
- 3. FLAX Wins the Vici LinkedUp Challenge for Open Data in Education http://alannahfitzgerald.org/2014/10/06/vici-competition/
- 4. Who are we in this flax research & Development collaboration?
- 5. FLAX Language at Waikato University http://flax.nzdl.org FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway
- 6. FLAX Language Project at the Greenstone Digital Library Lab, Waikato University NZ Professor Ian Witten FLAX Project Lead Dr Shaoqun Wu FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer
- 7. Research on Open FLAX Collections http://oerresearchhub.org/ Alannah Fitzgerald Open Fellow with OERRH FLAX Language & Open Education Researcher
- 8. OER Research Hypotheses http://oerresearchhub.org/collaborative-research/hypotheses/
- 9. Open Source language TOOLS development
- 11. FLAX – Flexible Language Acquisition Flexible Language Acquisition library
- 12. Google-esque Interface Designs Designed for the non-expert corpus user, namely: learners, teachers, subject academics, instructional designers and language resource developers.
- 13. Introducing the Wikipedia Miner Toolkit (Milne & Witten, 2013)
- 14. Building Interactivity into FLAX Language Collections
- 16. FLAX Across Platforms • FLAX Website flax.nzdl.org for hosting open online language collections • Building directly onto the Web with OER • FLAX multilingual open-source software for download • Set up your own FLAX server online or; • Build collections offline for use on your PC • FLAX Android app for download • Interact with game-based FLAX collections while on the go • FLAX for MOODLE plug-in for download • FLAX for MOOC Platforms? • FLAX in conjunction with translation technologies?
- 17. Training Videos for FLAX on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/bananakiwiful/videos
- 18. Domain-specific open language collections building
- 19. Demo Law Collections in FLAX http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=fp&sa=collAbout&c=BlaRC&if=
- 20. Collaboration with Subject Specialists “In the emerging academic literacies approach involving cooperation between subject specialists and writing teachers, the aim is to help the students develop metacognitive awareness of the roles and functions of writing in that discipline, to enable them to stand back from it and observe how it functions, and then to help them gradually participate in the genres, where genre is understood as a constellation of actions rather than a list of formal features.” (Breeze, 2012)
- 21. Law Collections in FLAX Type of media in the FLAX Law Collections Number and source of items in the FLAX Law Collections Podcast audio files & transcripts (OpenSpires - OER) 15 Lectures (Oxford Law Faculty and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) MOOC lecture transcripts & videos (streamed via YouTube & Vimeo - OER) 4 MOOC Collections: Copyright Law (Harvard/edX), English Common Law (Uni. of London/Coursera), Age of Globalization (Texas at Austin/edX), Environmental Law & Politics (OpenYale) PhD Law theses (Open Access) British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC) by Marin, 2012 (Open Access) 50 EThoS Theses at the British Library (Abstracts, Introductions, Conclusions) 8.85 million-word corpus derived from freely available legal content on the BAILII website Research Articles (Open Access) 40 Articles (DOAJ - Directory of Open Access Journals)
- 22. Working with Full Texts
- 24. Domain-specific Collocations We focus on lexical collocations with noun-based structures because they are the most salient and important patterns in domain-specific text. Collocations from the English Common Law MOOC: •verb + noun e.g. abolish judicial review •noun + noun e.g. precedent case •adjective + noun e.g. common law •noun + of + noun e.g. court of appeal
- 25. Lexical Bundles “Lexical bundles” are multi-word sequences with distinctive syntactic patterns and discourse functions that are commonly used in academic prose (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al, 2003, 2004). Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC): •noun phrase + of e.g. In the course of his •prepositional phrase + of e.g. on the part of the •it + verb/adjective phrase e.g. it is common ground that •be + noun/adjective phrase e.g. be taken into account in •verb phrase + that e.g. There is no doubt that
- 26. Lexical Bundles
- 28. Linking to the FLAX Learning Collocations Collection (Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)
- 29. Good Ol’ Part-Of-Speech Tagging
- 30. Researching resources at the interface of openness for academic English
- 31. Key Research Data Sets: • Data for evaluation and impact of FLAX open language collections on learning and teaching • Survey and Think-Aloud Protocols to evaluate the FLAX Language System user experience • Analysis of written and spoken language • Interview and focus-group data (f2f and online) – stakeholders (language teachers, academics, MOOC providers) involved in the development of the academic language collections used in this research.
- 32. References • Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2003). Lexical bundles in speech and writing: an initial taxonomy. In A. Wilson, P. Rayson, & T. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus linguistics by the lune: A festschrift for Geoffrey Leech (pp. 71–92). Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang. • Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at . . .: lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405. Biber, D. (2006). University Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam. • Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purpose, 26, 263–286. • Breeze, R. (2012). Rethinking Academic Writing Pedagogy for the European University. Rodopi, Amsterdam. • Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222-239.
- 33. Thank You FLAX Language Project http://flax.nzdl.org/ Shaoqun Wu: shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca Ian Witten: ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz OER Research Hub http://oerresearchhub.org/ TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/ Twitter: @AlannahFitz
Editor's Notes
- #11: Teachers can construct collections of different types: for different purposes and for different types of students. The collections can be: item specific domain and/or topic specific graded for levels of difficulty representative of a particular source or of a particular genre subsets of a larger corpus e.g. BAWE. Potentially students can also construct collections (see Charles, 2012)
- #22: Less than half of all Open Access journals are published using Creative Commons licenses so this is where Open Educational Resources and Open Source Software have more in common than they do with OA. But there are OA journals we can use and most of which are published under the most flexible Creative Commons licenses e.g. CC-BY with only a few being the most restrictive e.g. CC-ND. Depending on the field there will be less or more OA journals. There are not many OA journals for Law but there are many Openly-licensed government papers in the field of Law. We will look at adding samples of these also in future. Being able to show demo corpora like the one we are building in FLAX online, enables us to explain to e.g. the British Library, what our intended uses are for theses writing for NC Educational and Research Development purposes for ESAP.
- #34: Please add your contact detes here, QMUL peeps!