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CALLex: a CALL game to study lexical relationships based on a semantic database

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2021

Henriëtte Visser
Henriëtte Visser*
Affiliation:
University of Heidelberg
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Abstract

This paper presents the prototype of CALLex, a program for learning lexical functions, created by a project funded by INTAS, a European organisation promoting cooperation between the European Union and the states of the former Soviet Union, developed by the Laboratory of Computational Linguistics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, supported by the universities of Klagenfurt, Austria and Heidelberg, Germany. The goal of the program is to facilitate language learning through several linguistic games in order to improve the lexical command of the language studied. The CALLex games access a lexico-semantic database consisting of two dictionaries, Russian and German, each containing roughly 1000 lexemes. The lexical functions cover a wide variety of lexical relationships, which can be roughly divided into three major groups: (1) collocations, which are syntagmatic relationships, such as ‘do x, nave x, or being in the state of x’, (trade) = conduct (trade) or (anger) = feel (anger), (2) substitutions, i.e. paradigmatic relationships, e.g. ‘a lexeme whose meaning is opposite to x’, (appear) = disappear, (courage) = cowardice, and (3) other prototypical relationships, ‘head of what is denoted by x’, (university) = rector, (tribe) = chief. While studying the combinatorial capabilities of a word and its most ‘idiomatic’ collocations, the student can get a feel for semantic fields and obtain structured access to the vocabulary and its syntactic expression in the foreign language. The strict separation of the CALL program and the underlying database facilitates the expansion of the linguistic resources on the one hand and the adaptation or the linguistic games to new didactic approaches on the other hand. This paper highlights the function of the database in the background of the program and the treatment of illrormed student input. Although some adjustments were made during the course of the project, a more flexible approach seems necessary. Here we envisage a component separate from, but interacting with the database, allowing for a more robust treatment of ill-formed input.

Type
Research Article
Information
ReCALL , Volume 11 , Issue S1: Natural Language Processing In Computer-Assisted Language Learning , May 1999 , pp. 50 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 1999

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