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Eckhard Bick - VISL

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(7) Tutoring in the case of a "close miss"<br />

Though the possibility to work with free, real life text and to make up one's own<br />

examples is compelling proof of the efficiency of the system's underlying parser (or<br />

at least proves that such efficiency is courageously being claimed ...), not all students<br />

master a foreign language to such a degree that they enjoy inventing their own<br />

sentences, and they will not always come up with a correct. sentence, either. And<br />

even copying and pasting from corpus texts (the obvious solution, implemented in<br />

both the Portuguese and English modules) may become tedious in the end. On the<br />

other hand, many people enjoy a test match - at least as long as they are not being<br />

watched or judged. Therefore, I have integrated a sentence randomiser into the<br />

system, that offers corpus examples of its own 240 if the input window is left empty in<br />

interactive grammar mode. In order not to hit upon headlines and other unorthodox<br />

or "incomplete" text material, all random text choices are cut at sentence delimiters<br />

(full stop, colon etc.), and filtered out if they do not contain at least one finite verb.<br />

240 Presently, the text base for the randomizer is about 1,000 sentences large, but since it is based on automatic analysis,<br />

ten or a hundred times that number would not be a problem, either.<br />

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