FootySpeak: Natural Language Generation for AFL Reports in Aboriginal Languages and English

Greetings from the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University is speaking on "Arrernte Footy: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte". The idea is to generate natural language new articles in English and Arrernte automatically from the data about an AFL football match. This is of interest to researchers, as well as having commercial application in financial and sports reporting, where there is a regular structure to what is reported and lots of statistics. This is also of interest for teaching languages and making languages more understandable. It occurs to me that the English language description of an AFL match is not really in English, it is in "FootySpeak", a subset of English (like Seaspeak). The same approach might be used to generate weather reports and emergency warnings, in a readable, but very precise language. The problem is that messages have to be created quickly in high stress situations.

A content selector, planner, deep realizer, dictionary complier, XLE and Weighted Finite-State Transducers (WFSTs) are used in turn to create the natural language sentences. A lexical functional grammar is used to describe the structure of sentences in the language. For Arrernte some featured not required in English are used, such as for reduplication. Also Glue semantics could be used, if the software would support it.

Some of the research was carried out at the Ngurratjuta Lightning Carnival (Lightning football is a shortened version). One use for the automatically generated text would be for teaching reading in schools, as football will be of many interest to many students than other topics.

Mark needs some recording or text of descriptions of football matches in Arrernte, so if you have any contact him.

ps: It would be interesting to generate Roy and HG commentary.

Arrernte Footy: Natural Language Generation for AFL Reports in Aboriginal Languages

Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University will speak on "Arrernte Footy: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte" at the Australian National University School of Language Studies in Canberra, 4pm, today. He will discuss the analysis of reports of AFL football matches in the language of the Arrernte people of Mparntwe (Alice Springs).

ANU School of Language Studies
Monday 13 February SEMINAR 4 pm Baldessin Building, room W 3.03 (Map)

Mark Dras, Department of Computing, Macquarie University

Title: A Computational Grammar and Natural Language Generation System for Arrernte

Abstract:

Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems have as their goal the generation of human-like text from some underlying representation, often numerical or other data from a database. We are currently developing an NLG system to generate texts in both English and Arrernte about Australian Rules football games, of the sort found in newspapers after a game has been played (e.g. "GEELONG has claimed the club's ninth premiership and marked itself as one of the greatest sides of all time with a stunning 38-point Grand Final win against Collingwood...."). The final stage of this system is a realisation component that is built around Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and its XLE environment for grammar development: this takes a description of the functional structure of a sentence, and uses a computational grammar to make appropriate lexical and syntactic choices to produce the actual sentence. A large-scale grammar of English has already been developed by the international ParGram project, which we will be using; we are now building a computational grammar of Arrernte, based on existing linguistic descriptions of the language.

In the talk I will give an overview of this system, with a focus on the computational grammar of Arrernte, in particular how we've implemented in the LFG formalism a number of constructions that have been discussed in the literature, such as complex predicates like associated motion.

Why students learn a language at university

In the first session at the Australian National University Educational Research Conference on 'Language learning: motivation and student retention', Dr Gabriele Schmidt reported research which showed that students were selecting German language studies out of general interest for travel, not for vocational reasons. The details are published in her book "Motives for Studying German in Australia: Re-examining the Profile and Motivation of German Studies Students in Australian Universities" (Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2011).

In response to this the courses were changed by removing traditional classroom instruction and replaced with more interactive activities. The conclusion was that there was no need to separate students into culture and services courses. However, this seems to me to have implications for government support for language studies. The assumption has been that language studies are of value for furthering international trade. If students are not enrolling for vocational purposes, it would be tempting to cancel funding to schools and universities for language studies. However, a follow-up study might find that graduates do find their language studies of use later, even if it is not why they selected them.

Re-examining the Profile and Motivation of German Studies Students in Australian Universities

Schmidt, Gabriele

Series: Duisburger Arbeiten zur Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaft - Volume 84

Year of Publication: 2011

Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2011. 190 pp., num. tables, 5 graphs
ISBN 978-3-631-60791-6 hb.
ISBN 978-3-653-01092-3 (eBook)

Discipline

» Linguistics
» Germanic Languages and Literatures

Book synopsis

The last comprehensive study of the motives for studying German in Australia was conducted in the late 1980s. The main objective of this thesis is not only to fill the gap of recent data but at the same time to analyse the new data in the context of relevant theories of language learning motivation. The data analysis focuses on students' demographic backgrounds, their motivation to learn German, and on their expectations towards course content. Where possible, the new data is compared with former studies in order to investigate what changes have occurred over the last two decades. It will be shown that these changes are primarily a reflection of changes to higher education policies. Overall, the thesis establishes a theoretically informed and data-based platform for curriculum development which will assist German Studies programs in designing their courses for the future.

Contents

Contents: Analysis of the profile and motivation of German Studies students in Australian universities - Data to relevant theories of language learning motivation - Changes in Australian higher education - Data-based platform for course design.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

Gabriele Schmidt has been a lecturer in the German Studies Program at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra since 1996. She received her Masters degree from the University of Bielefeld, specialising in German as a Foreign Language. Before she joined the ANU she worked for six years at the Institute for International Communication (IIK) at the University of Düsseldorf (Germany).

Series

Duisburg Papers on Research in Language and Culture. Vol. 84
Edited by Ulrich Ammon, René Dirven and Martin Pütz