m*honey: a small tool for alternative langauge learning · 24 November 06 by Ray Crowley
Requirements Python enabled mobile device.
Rationale:
The user is in an alternative language environment and desires to actively work on acquiring and developing his/her vocabulary.
People have their mobile devices with them at nearly all times while interfacing with public space and accordingly the mobile device is perfectly suited to help in the language learning process.
Example use scenario
1. User is walking down the street with a friend in the second language of environment
2. User desires to keep a record of a new word he/she comes across. This could a 1st to 2nd language discovery or 2nd to 1st discovery.
3. User has m*honey installed on his / her mobile device.
4. User asks acquaintance what most common translation of lexical item is.
5. User activates programme and textually enters first primary language element, then user is prompted to textually enter translation.
6. User is prompted to make an optional sound recording of lexical element.
7. These units (1st text string, 2nd textstring, sound recording) are saved on the memory of the mobile device and indexed for easy recall at a later point.
Potential Extensions of core application:
1. Upload of text and sound to webserver via MMS.
2. Option to attach image with textual items for visual learning.
Out of Scope
m*honey is not a translation tool or electronic dictionary, rather m*honey is a framework to help a user keep track of new words he/she is learning in an alternative language environment.
Code: download here
tags: language, linguistics, locative, mobile, python, script
TagCloud The Unnamable · 24 October 06 by Ray Crowley
Recently I came across a great project called TagCrowd by Standford Researcher Daniel Steinbock . I like tags, I like lexical analysis so I love this. Enter up to 100kb of text for lexical frequency analysis and hey presto there you go a beautiful TagCloud (published under a Creative Commons License).
Below are the results of the application applied to Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable
Learning Estonian | Toolmaking · 17 October 06 by Ray Crowley
I need something quite simple to help me to learn Eesti keel (Estonian): an mp3 file of the 40 or so vowels and diphthongs in the language.
Once I have this then at least I can begin to make mistakes in spoken Estonian for the next couple of years.
I have searched and asked relevant institutions but to no avail.
If I haven’t sourced such a resource by the end of October 2006 I will work with some Estonian friends to make the recordings and release them here into the public domain.
tags: audio, estonian, language, linguisticsT*int · 17 October 06 by Ray Crowley
I am currently working on the design of an augmented reality project. ‘Textspace’ seems to have been used for a couple of things so I am calling this project T*int (Textspace Is Not Textspace).
Essentially this will be toolset which could be deployed for no other purpose than the following artistic goal: to blur to boundaries between the discrete linguistic acts of reading|writing listening|speaking. This defamiliarization of our core linguistic competencies may lead to greater self awareness in the actants.
Here are some early design scribbles:
??The graphic environment would be purely vector text based.3d audio
processing and transmission is critical to the immersive experience. The complex element in this environment is a linguistic processor required to recognize wordstress, intonation, tone (such as sarcasm etc), class etc. Scenarios: two users in an room with 3d sound system (not collocated). Users wear head mounted displays.
This has lead me to carry out an overview of speech recognition parsing engines. Seems my original concept was a slightly ambitious :)
So now the immersive experience will be based on pre-parsed texts (extracts from Beckett, Joyce, a poem by Ginsberg, a newspaper article). Accordingly it will be primary a passive experience with the potential for basic user commands rather than half-duplex near real-time dialogue between two human users. The work continues..
this has provided a good spring board into the depths of langauge processing:
tags: beckett, hci, linguistics, project, vr