Gigafida 2.0: The Reference Corpus of Written Standard Slovene

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 323–331 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 323 Constructing Multimodal Language Learner Texts Using LARA: Experiences with Nine Languages Elham Akhlaghi1, Branislav Bédi2, Fatih Bekta¸s3, Harald Berthelsen4, Matthias Butterweck5 Cathy Chua6, Catia Cucchiarini7, Gül¸sen Eryi˘git3, Johanna Gerlach8, Hanieh Habibi8 Neasa Ní Chiaráin4, Manny Rayner8, Steinþór Steingrímsson2, Helmer Strik7 1Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran; 2The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, Iceland; 3Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey, 4Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; 5Independent scholar; 6University of Adelaide, Australia; 7Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST), Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands; 8FTI/TIM, University of Geneva, Switzerland elham.akhlaghi@mail.um.ac.ir, branislav.bedi@arnastofnun.is, bektas18@itu.edu.tr, berthelh@tcd.ie, matthias@butterweck.de, Cathy.Chua@adelaide.edu.au, c.cucchiarini@let.ru.nl, gulsenc@itu.edu.tr, Johanna.Gerlach@unige.ch, hanieh.habibi@unige.ch, Neasa.NiChiarain@tcd.ie, Emmanuel.Rayner@unige.ch, steinthor@arnastofnun.is, w.strik@let.ru.nl Abstract LARA (Learning and Reading Assistant) is an open source platform whose purpose is to support easy conversion of plain texts into multimodal online versions suitable for use by language learners. This involves semi-automatically tagging the text, adding other annotations and recording audio. The platform is suitable for creating texts in multiple languages via crowdsourcing techniques that can be used for teaching a language via reading and listening. We present results of initial experiments by various collaborators where we measure the time required to produce substantial LARA resources, up to the length of short novels, in Dutch, English, Farsi, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Swedish and Turkish. The first results are encouraging. Although there are some startup problems, the conversion task seems manageable for the languages tested so far. The resulting enriched texts are posted online and are freely available in both source and compiled form. Keywords: CALL, reading, tagging, open source 1. Introduction LARA (Learning and Reading Assistant; https:// www.unige.ch/callector/lara/; (Akhlaghi et al., 2019)) is an open source project, initiated during Q3 2018. The general goal is to develop methods for creat- ing online resources that support language learning through reading and and listening. It is uncontroversial that reading and listening practice are important for L2 learning (Grabe and Stoller, 2012), and several platforms now exist that fa- cilitate conversion of texts into online versions tailored to the L2 learner; prominent examples include Learning With Texts1, Alpheois2 and Clilstore3. LARA, which uses a crowdsourcing/online community approach where content creators and content users interact in a shared online envi- ronment, adapts and extends many of the ideas used in these earlier platforms and adds new ones. In particular, LARA texts are organised so that, when the user accesses them through the online portal (Habibi, 2019), a personalised concordance is built up which associates each word in the text with previous occurrences in the learner’s own reading history. Other core functionality includes linking words to audio recordings and translations. When the learner sees a word in a LARA text they are reading, they are thus always in a position to find out where they have seen the word be- fore, what it sounds like, and what it means. An example is shown in Figure 1. …

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