A flexible language learning platform based on language resources and web services

AbstractWe present Lärka, the language learning platform of Spräkbanken (the Swedish Language Bank). It consists of an exercise generator which reuses resources available through Spräkbanken: mainly Korp, the corpus infrastructure, and Karp, the lexical infrastructure. Through Lärka we reach new user groups ― students and teachers of Linguistics as well as second language learners and their teachers ― and this way bring Spräkbanken’s resources in a relevant format to them. Lärka can therefore be viewed as an case of real-life language resource evaluation with end users. In this article we describe Lärka’s architecture, its user interface, and the five exercise types that have been released for users so far. The first user evaluation following in-class usage with students of linguistics, speech therapy and teacher candidates are presented. The outline of future work concludes the paper.