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:

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 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: – Distribution website, forum and news on the development: – moodle/

CALPIU 2008 A virtual multilingual classroom Tak Moltes gràcies Thank you Gracias Merci Muito obrigado Большое спасибо Mulţumesc Aïtah…