| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
TAKAHASHI Sakutarou Tokyo Woman's Christian University, College of Arts and Sciences, Professor, 文理学部, 教授 (60022315)
SANO Hiroshi Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Professor, 外国語学部, 教授 (30282776)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,400,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,600,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥1,800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,800,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In this project, we carried out a development of an e-Learning system of English on the basis of computer-based materials and natural language processing technology. TUFS* Collection of Sentences from BNC for English Grammatical Terms was made public on Shogakukan SCN** in September, 2006 (http://scn02.corpora.jp/~sakura04/index.html). It is a collection of sentences illustrative of English grammatical terms, which was jointly constructed by Hiroshi Sano's Office at TUFS and Shogakukan. (Hiroshi Sano is a co-researcher of the present project.) 1,320 sentence patterns which can be classified into 144 major and 14 minor grammatical categories were established by a thorough examination of high-school English readers and English grammar coursebooks. The collection contains 800,000 sentences selected out of about 8,000,000 sentences which were extracted from BNC according to the 1,320 sentence patterns. It can be used as new teaching materials for an e-learning system since it is extracted
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from a massive corpus. Incorporated in the collection is a retrieval system of sentence patterns which was developed in 2004. The system can find all the sentence patterns within a specified vocabulary level. The information of vocabulary levels was obtained from JACET*** 8,000 Words, Shogakukan Progressive 4,800 Words, and ALC 12,000 Words.
Another collection was made of sentences illustrating the uses of phrasal verbs. Phrasal verbs are verbal expressions consisting of simple verbs and prepositions/adverbs. They are very frequently used as colloquial expressions which can signify various meanings. Generally speaking, the Japanese have much difficulty in mastering phrasal verbs. Therefore, this collection should be very useful for learning such frequently-used expressions. About 4,300 phrasal verbs and 32 sentence patterns were digitized, and a new system was developed for extracting phrasal verb patterns from BNC.
An evaluation test was conducted of the extraction system for TUFS Collection of Sentences from BNC for English Grammatical Terms, and its efficiency and limits. One hundred sentences were randomly chosen for each of the 1,320 sentence patterns, and evaluated as to their adequacy as teaching materials. On the basis of the test results we will improve our English resources.
*TUFS is an abbreviation of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Fuchu, Tokyo.
**Shogakukan SCN is a commercial website established to explore the possibilities of corpus uses, and intends to support not only those researchers in linguistics, language education, literature, but also anyone interested in language studies in general.
***JACET stands for Japan Association of College English Teachers. Less
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