計畫編號 NSC 96-2411-H-004-048
計畫名稱 Sketch Engine 為語言學習的工具
出國人員姓名
服務機關及職稱 史尚明,銘傳大學 or 國立政治大學,助理教授
會議時間地點 Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 23-24 February 2008
會議名稱 4th CamTESOL Conference on English Language Teaching
發表論文題目 Learning words right with the Sketch Engine: Meaningful lexical acquisition from corpora and the web
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My paper, on automatic techniques for vocabulary building, was well attended (despite the large number of parallel sessions) and received. I decided to make it a participative session, including a task for attendees to work on. Attendees would have preferred an interactive demo of the
vocabulary generating toolset, but that was not really possible due to local technical constraints.
I attended a large number of other presentations on both vocabulary and on the use of technology in ELT. A talk by Suksan Suppasetseree & Kiattichai Saitakham revealed that Thai vocabulary
learning strategies are similar to those employed in Taiwan, suggesting that there is wider
applications for the tools being designed by the PI. Beniko Mason’s paper on vocabulary acquisition through story listening emphasized the importance of learning naturally occurring vocabulary.
A paper by George MacLean questioned some learners’ willingness to embrace technology in language learning. This may be true of the Cambodian context, but it seems that in Taiwan computers are very much taken for granted.
與會心得
This was a very large TESOL conference, in another Asian country. There were many opportunities to meet researchers, teachers and potential collaborators from all over Asia. It was organized by an Australian educational service, and met international standards in almost all respects. A large number of presenters and delegates were from overseas, and the principal keynote speaker was David Nunan, one of the leading of the Task Based approach to language learning (and currently the world’s top-selling EFL textbook writer).
出席國際學術會議心得報告
計畫編號 NSC 96-2411-H-004-048
計畫名稱 Sketch Engine 為語言學習的工具
出國人員姓名
服務機關及職稱 史尚明,銘傳大學 or 國立政治大學,助理教授
會議時間地點 Lisbon, Portugal, 4-6 July 2008
會議名稱 8th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference
發表論文題目 Automatic cloze generation: getting sentences and distractors from corpora
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This was a relatively small conference, one of only two (the other being PALC, which I attended and presented at last year) on the topic of corpus studies in language learning. There were a number of people well-known in the field at my talk. My audience was supportive and enthusiastic, and I was asked by several people to supply further details. One criticism was that the work could have been better motivated pedagogically. However, there are distinct needs that need to be met in Taiwan and other parts of Asia which that critic might not have been aware of.
There were many interesting talks on corpus-based approaches to learning, for example talks on data-driven learning by Alex Boulton of Nancy and by Kiyomi Chujo & Kathryn Oghigian of Tokyo. A number of new computational tools were described, including Michael Barlow’s
CorpusLab and the new MICASE (EAP corpus from the University of Michigan) online interface.
與會心得
I was originally due to give a pre-conference workshop, on learning Chinese using the Sketch Engine, but the workshop had to be cancelled because not enough people signed up for it. This was a pity, not only because it meant that probably the first ever workshop of that type did not take place, but because a lot of preparatory work had gone into it, including some quite substantial
modifications to the Chinese corpus, for which a program had to be specially written.
The plan had been to take the Chinese class of verb-object compounds (開車, 吃飯 and the like) to teach participants a little basic Chinese, and show how the Sketch Engine can be used to bring out the importance of collocation in the language. The planned workshop is described at
http://talc8.isla.pt/workshops.html#mandarin
email contact, including people working with and on the Sketch Engine. One small criticism is that the conference was very much geared to the learning of English through corpora, with less focus on other languages.
出席國際學術會議心得報告
計畫編號 NSC 96-2411-H-004-048
計畫名稱 Sketch Engine 為語言學習的工具
出國人員姓名
服務機關及職稱 史尚明,銘傳大學 or 國立政治大學,助理教授
會議時間地點 Barcelona, Spain, July 10th-15th 2008 會議名稱 Tallers de lexicografia: Lexicom 2008 發表論文題目 none
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This one-week workshop was an opportunity for me to learn more about the Sketch Engine from the people who designed and programmed it. I was already conversant with the basic functions of SkE, but I will be able to use the knowledge of advanced programming functionality that I acquired to implement the vocabulary list generation and cloze item generation systems that I’m currently working on.
與會心得
The workshop also was an opportunity to share with others some of the work on Chinese that I have done with Sketch Engine. In particular, I have a new potential collaborator in China who is
interested in the corpora that I have built and use.
出席國際學術會議心得報告
計畫編號 NSC 96-2411-H-004-048
計畫名稱 Sketch Engine 為語言學習的工具
出國人員姓名
服務機關及職稱 史尚明,銘傳大學 or 國立政治大學,助理教授
會議時間地點 Barcelona, Spain, July 15 - 19 2008 會議名稱 XIII Euralex International Congress 發表論文題目 none
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One key paper that I wanted to hear was that by Adam Kilgarriff, the designer of the Sketch Engine, on the use of a new feature called GDEX. This is designed to present concordance lines, from a corpus, in the likely order of usefulness to a user. This is done by ranking sentences according to length, the kind of lexis they contain (compared to a reference corpus) and several other factors.
This will make a very important contribution to the choice of sentences used for context, in my cloze generation project. Other interesting papers were on collaborative dictionary editing by Internet forum, and on generation of word profiles from a large, balanced corpus of German.
與會心得
This was a large and elaborate international conference, with many famous names from lexicography and corpus linguistics in attendance, and presentations in a number of different languages. There were many opportunities to learn from speakers, and also to encourage and help younger researchers, by asking relevant questions and giving praise where appropriate.