Japanese Learning Support Systems: Hinoki Project Report

• Main Authors: Bor HODOŠČEK, Kikuko NISHINA
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts) 2012-12-01
• Series: Acta Linguistica Asiatica
• Subjects: CALL; reading assistance system; writing assistance system; scientific and technical Japanese corpus; learner corpus; genre
• Online Access: http://revije.ff.uni-lj.si/ala/article/view/221

In this report, we introduce the Hinoki project, which set out to develop web-based Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) systems for Japanese language learners more than a decade ago. Utilizing Natural Language Processing technologies and other linguistic resources, the project has come to encompass three systems, two corpora and many other resources. Beginning with the reading assistance system Asunaro, we describe the construction of Asunaro's multilingual dictionary and it's dependency grammar-based approach to reading assistance. The second system, Natsume, is a writing assistance system that uses large-scale corpora to provide an easy to use collocation search feature that is interesting for it's inclusion of the concept of genre. The final system, Nutmeg, is an extension of Natsume and the Natane learner corpus. It provides automatic correction of learners errors in compositions by using Natsume for its large corpus and genre-aware collocation data and Natane for its data on learner errors.