From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Tue Jan 30 03:36:00 1996 Received: from wnt.dc.lsoft.com (wnt.dc.lsoft.com [205.186.43.7]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id DAA08144 for ; Tue, 30 Jan 1996 03:35:56 -0500 Message-Id: <199601300835.DAA08144@locke.ccil.org> Received: from PEACH.EASE.LSOFT.COM (205.186.43.4) by wnt.dc.lsoft.com (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.0a) with SMTP id 96686C20 ; Tue, 30 Jan 1996 3:03:53 -0500 Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 17:52:52 +0000 Reply-To: Richard Kennaway Sender: Lojban list From: Richard Kennaway Subject: Re: LogFlash and LESSY (!) To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu, conlang@diku.dk Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2173 (Still crossposted to conlang and lojban; apologies to those receiving it twice, but it does seem relevant to both.) Lojbab writes: >Examples are Russian "tut", >"zdec'" both meaning "here", used almost identically. How do I come up >with a distinct keyword? With FlashCards, I deal with synonyms by allowing multiple keywords on either side of a card: Russian aux.Russ. English aux.Eng. tut|zdec here When Russian is to be displayed, both "tut" and "zdec" are displayed, and the expected answer is "here". When English is displayed, either "tut" or "zdec" will be accepted as an answer. This may not be the best way. It might be better in Recog mode to display the flashcard twice, once showing "tut" and once showing "zdec", in both cases expecting "here" as the answer. In fact, that seems so much better that I think I'll implement it in the next version. In the case of not-so-near synonyms that one wants to distinguish, the auxiliary fields are useful: Dutch aux. Dutch English aux.English sluiten close (vb. ...a door) besluiten close (vb. ...a meeting) or one might add alternative keywords which together narrow down the intended meaning: Dutch aux. Dutch English aux.English sluiten close|shut (vb. ...a door) besluiten close|conclude (vb. ...a meeting) >I also faced the problem that I was still learning Russian declensions. >It is fine to add in the infinitive of the verb, but then you need the >nth person singular/plural, and for the nouns (especially the irregular ones Dutch doesn't have that problem. :-) Learning declensions and conjugations is something that none of our current tools is well suited for. If anyone wants to start work on a LESSY, this looks like a promising area. Is there anyone here who knows anything about the current state of the art in computer-aided language learning? ___ \X/ Richard Kennaway, jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk, http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/ School of Information Systems, Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.