A Language Usage-based Service for Providing Formative Feedback and Learner Positioning

Gaston Burek, Gillian Armitt, Dale Gerdemann, Bernhard Hoisl, Robert Koblischke, Christoph Mauerhofer, Petya Osenova, Kiril Simov

Publikation: KonferenzbeitragKonferenzposter

Abstract

Self-directed learners can benefit from personalised 'feedback on demand' during their learning but this is often not practical owing to tutors' time constraints. Tutors can benefit from computerised support with positioning learners and providing individualised feedback at the right level. Language technologies (phrase extraction and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)) analysing speech genres (Bakhtin 1986) offer an opportunity to address these issues. Experts in a domain develop a speech genre, with characteristic phrases. Becoming an expert involves the adoption of the community's speech genre. Thus, learner knowledge can be evaluated by means of textual distance based on characteristic phrases. Through the EU-funded LTfLL project, bespoke on-line software was designed as Service Usage Models in collaboration with a commercial training partner. Ontology and lexical resources are used to identify concepts covered by learners. Positioning is achieved through combining linguistic patterns (phrases) extraction and LSA (Burek and Gerdemann 2009) to compare learner texts with a corpus of expert texts built from IT learning materials and high quality learner texts. The software indirectly measures learners' degree of expertise by textual distance to the relevant speech genre. The poster illustrates the feedback and positioning information provided by the user interface and how the language technology-based comparison of learner and expert texts is achieved to compare speech genres.
OriginalspracheEnglisch
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 2010

Österreichische Systematik der Wissenschaftszweige (ÖFOS)

  • 102
  • 602011 Computerlinguistik
  • 503008 E-Learning

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