The Open-Source FLAX Language System Alannah Fitzgerald Shaoqun Wu Ian H. Witten Xiaofeng Yu

The eBook of FLAX “FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) is both a vision and a tool that you can use for language learning. The Web contains innumerable language activities, quizzes, and games, but they are fixed: the activities are cast in stone and the material is chosen by others. Our vision is to put the control back where it belongs, in the hands of teachers and learners.”

Who are we in this flax research & Development collaboration?

FLAX Language at Waikato University http://flax.nzdl.org FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway

FLAX Language Project at the Greenstone Digital Library Lab, Waikato University NZ Dr Shaoqun Wu FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer Professor Ian Witten FLAX Project Lead

Research on Open FLAX Collections Alannah Fitzgerald Open Fellow with OERRH FLAX Language & Open Education Researcher http://oerresearchhub.org/

Open Source language TOOLS development

FLAX Digital Library Collections Collocations database FLAX Digital Library Collections Open Educational Resources 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) Glossary

Google-esque Interface Designs Designed for the non-expert corpus user, namely: learners, teachers, subject academics, instructional designers and language resource developers.

Introducing the Wikipedia Miner Toolkit (Milne & Witten, 2013)

Building Interactivity into FLAX Language Collections

FLAX Activities Continued

Free Android Apps

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?

Domain-specific open language collections building

The eBook of FLAX “FLAX enables teachers to build bespoke libraries very easily. It is built upon powerful digital library technology, and provides access to vast linguistic resources containing countless examples of actual, authentic, usage in contemporary text. But teachers can also build collections using their own material, focusing on language learning in a particular domain (e.g., business, law) or motivating students by using text from a particular context (e.g., country or region, common interests).”

Working with Full Texts

Wikify Your Collections

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

Lexical Bundles Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC): “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

Lexical Bundles

Collocations Within Collections

Linking to the FLAX Learning Collocations Collection (Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)

Good Ol’ Part-Of-Speech Tagging

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. Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222-239.

August 16, 2010 Look Out for FLAX in April with Russell Stannard’s - Teacher Training Videos http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com

Thank You FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/ The How-to eBook of FLAX: http://flax-doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf FLAX Game-based Apps for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca Shaoqun Wu: shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz Ian Witten: ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz Xiaofeng (Alex) Yu: Alex.Yu@wintec.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 Please add your contact detes here, QMUL peeps!