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Let's play with proverbs? NLP tools and resources for iCALL applications around proverbs for PFL
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Abstract(s)
Proverbs are an important form of cultural expression of a society and are related to various areas of
knowledge and human experience (González Rey, 2002). While linguistic elements in widespread
use, proverbs are very rich structures both from a cultural and from a linguistic point of view and can
therefore contribute significantly to the teaching of languages, both native and foreign (Council of
Europe, 2001). However, though there are extensive collections of Portuguese proverbs with tens of
thousands of forms and its variants (Reis, in preparation), its automatic identification in texts is quite
difficult, given its formal variation, both lexical and syntactic (Chacoto, 1994). Nevertheless, using
real examples, where proverbs are used in a natural or spontaneous discourse context, is a more natural
way to learn and teach the complex conditions and communicative situations that determine the
use and meaning of these expressions. On the other hand, frequency indices associated with proverbs
and its variants would allow one to select the most common expressions. These are precisely the
most interesting forms from the point of view of their teaching/learning and could serve as a basis for
the construction of educational games, particularly for learning Portuguese autonomously as a foreign
language (PFL) assisted by computer. To make this possible, it is necessary, first of all, be able
to recognize the occurrence of proverbs in the texts (Rassi et al. 2014), including the instances where
these expressions are presented in a truncated or creatively modified form, for example, to better suit
the communicative situation or to produce new and more expressive meanings. In this paper, we present
an on-going project, which aims at automatic identification of proverbs in texts. In this interdisciplinary
study, we combine natural language processing tools with questionnaires construction
techniques for teaching purposes (Hoshino and Nakagawa 2005, Correia et al. 2010). This is illustrated
here with different sets of formats that can be built based on the knowledge of the form and
variation of proverbs, as well as their frequency in corpora.
Description
Keywords
Portuguese proverbs Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (iCALL) Didactic gaming Natural language processing (NLP)