[SlawKaus] [SCLA] Announcing the SMARTool for learners of Russian

[Ruprecht von Waldenfels]

-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
Betreff: 	[SCLA] Announcing the SMARTool for learners of Russian
Datum: 	Fri, 7 Feb 2020 08:50:06 +0000
Von: 	Laura A Janda <laura.janda at uit.no>
An: 	scla at lists.fas.harvard.edu <scla at lists.fas.harvard.edu>



Announcing the SMARTool for learners of Russian (Strategic Mastery in 
Acquiring Rich morphology Tool), a free open-source resource you can 
find here: https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/.

SMARTools: Strategic Mastery in Acquiring Rich morphology: Tools for 
language learning

Many languages have “rich morphology”, meaning that words can have many 
different forms to signal grammatical categories such as case, number, 
tense, etc. Rich morphology presents a challenge for second language 
learners because even a basic vocabulary of a few thousand words can 
entail mastery of over a hundred thousand word forms. This is 
particularly the case with Slavic languages like Polish, Czech, Slovak, 
and Croatian, Baltic languages like Lithuanian and Latvian, and Uralic 
languages like Finnish and Estonian, but not irrelevant for a Romance 
language like Spanish with large paradigms for verbs. However, only a 
handful of the potential forms of any given word occur frequently, while 
the remainder are rare (some vanishingly so).

Now that linguists have digital collections of language samples known as 
“corpora” it is possible to scientifically determine which forms of any 
given word are of highest frequency, as well as what grammatical and 
collocational contexts motivate those few frequent forms. This makes it 
possible to strategically focus language learning in a new way and make 
new tools available to the public. This new approach has been realized 
for 3000 vocabulary items in the SMARTool for Russian for 
English-speaking learners: https://smartool.github.io/smartool-rus-eng/. 
A computational learning experiment gives evidence that this approach is 
better than expecting learners to memorize entire paradigms of forms.

A proposal for a SMARTools COST Action (EU funding) is underway to 
coordinate implementation of SMARTools for languages of Europe and 
beyond with digital tools that are free and open-source.

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