How do we work in a virtual multilingual classroom?
A virtual multilingual classroom with Moodle and Apertium
Cultural and Linguistic Practices in the International University
Roskilde, December 2008
Linguamón–UOC Chair in Multilingualism
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Table of contents– General framework
• Moodle• Apertium
– Integration• Language detector• Spelling checker
– Linguistic issues– Prototype– Final remarks– Future work
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Moodle. What is it and what does it offer?– Moodle is a course management system.
• Courses can be followed 100% online.• Easy to install, to maintain and to manage.• Freely distributed.
– The Open University of Catalonia (UOC) has students from at least 45 different countries.
– Challenge: making Moodle multilingual.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Apertium. What is it and what does it offer?– Apertium is a free software machine
translation platform. It offers the following tools:
• Language-independent machine translation engine,
• Linguistic data,• Managing tools.
– In this project, Apertium has worked in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• How does it work?– In Apertium, the input must go trough the
following processes:• Unformatting: the input is divided into format
information and text to translate.• Morphological analysis: each word receives
all the possible morphological tags.• Part-of-speech disambiguation: each word
receives only one morphological tag.• Shallow syntactic analysis: a shallow parse
tree of the source sentence is built.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• How does it work?• Shallow structural transfer: the information of
the parse tree is transferred to an equivalent parse tree.
• Lexical transfer: according to the syntactic information, the most appropriate words are selected.
• Morphological generation: each word is adapted to its context.
• Reformatting: the format information from the input is retrieved and transferred to the target text.
– Apertium's Website:<http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium-
www/>
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Integration. Description.– Messages are NOT directly translated, as
the performance of the machine translator would not be successful.
• The messages in academic forums have a lot of mistakes (Climent and Moré: 2005).
• This kind of texts has particular features (abbreviations, capital letters, etc.).
– The input text has to go trough a language detector and a pre-edition module before entering into Apertium.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• How does it work?– The automatic language detector detects
the language of the source text thanks to the TextCat algorithm by Gertjan van Noord.
– The text goes trough a spelling checker, which works as follows:
• Typographical changes using regular expressions.
• Ad-hoc changes according to the user needs.• Changes according to the dictionary of
wordforms and dictionaries selected by the user.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
– Which changes will the spelling checker make?
• It checks if all the words in lower case in the text are contained in one of its dictionaries.
• If they are not, it works as follows:– Deleting one character in every position,– Adding one character in every position,– Changing every character for every possible
character.• Thanks to a statistic method, the algorithm
will select the most probable correction.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Linguistic issues.– Following Climent and Moré (2005), we
studied the messages left in the academic forums at the UOC website, in order to analyse the text type.
– Messages show particularities (use of emoticons, @, abbreviations, etc.), do not use standard language and writers do not pay attention when writing.
– We save the corrections (with its paradigms) of the mistakes and habits in the ad-hoc list.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
– We elaborated a statistic of most frequent changes, to know which changes would be more frequent.
Spanish i:í 81– Most mistakes were due to accents.
Treating them before translating avoids:» ingles (sp) -> groins (en))
– The changes made by the spelling checker are not shown in Moodle. They are just used to get a better translation.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Prototype– Showing the original text and its
translations in the same window is not friendly in multilingual environments.
– Every Moodle user defines its language settings, so he or she will always see the messages in the selected language.
– A colour system will indicate whether the user is reading an original text or a translation.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
– Default page when choosing English as the user's language.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
– Default page when choosing Spanish as the user's language.
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
– Through a role assignment system, corrections of the translations can be made:
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Final remarks– The virtual multilingual learning
environment is ready to host courses in Catalan, Spanish, English and French, following the users needs.
– The user can read the information in the language he or she prefers, no matter which one and without having to wait.
– A survey among users showed that, in general, they appreciate the multilingual Moodle
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Future work– Release executable files and user guides.– Support users during a limited period of
time.– Open the integration to other translation
systems.– Integrate the multilingual capacity to
other communication environments (wikis, blogs, etc.).
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
• Website of the trial version:– http://cml.uoc.edu
• Distribution website, forum and news on the development:–http://sourceforge.net/projects/
apertium-moodle/
CALPIU 2008
A virtual multilingual classroom
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Thank youGraciasMerci
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