So the process of automating a pipeline to generate audio for practicing minimal pairs has been largely successful, in that I’m able to take a YouTube URL (or more precisely, multiple URLs) and from that generate data ready to be sent to a server for use in creating a website to help students practice listening […]
Although my recent attempts to get something meaningful out of a wikipedia data dump have hit a few walls, I still hope to eventually do something interesting with applying named entity recognition or some sort of (semantic?) dependency parsing to be able to construct simple comprehension questions. But that’s being shelved for the time being. […]
https://www.word-booster.com/ I’m very happy (though feeling a bit outplayed) to find a great example of a micro material out in the vast internet. It’s a bit similar to an idea that I had (see previous post), though to be fair, it is much more nicely designed than anything I’ve ever done. It’s an online service […]
So since I haven’t really developed that much (lots of stuff in the works), thought I would just riff a bit about some current thoughts related to using Natural Language Processing and/or Machine Learning to create micromaterials (…but mostly NLP). I’ve been playing around with the Stanford CoreNLP library (which also means I’m now firmly […]
Given the 2 month hiatus from any posts, it’s probably obvious that I haven’t been working on web-based micromaterials with any concerted effort. Which is true. So I thought I’d write a quick post about the things that I HAVE been spending my time on, which I suppose are tangentially related: #1) Pypobot This is […]
Based on the recent work (starting from pg. 184) of Wayne Dickerson, I decided to see if I could mock up a basic chatbot on Telegram that would use the #NAIL rule system to assign primary and anchor stress in a simple informal sentence. Dickerson’s research has suggested that there are usually two stress peaks in a […]
I’m very happy to announce the initial release of my first micromaterial that is NOT primarily web-based. It’s a chatbot that lives inside of a public account on Viber, and its purpose is to help guide students along a treasurehunt in the city of Oxford, UK. The motivation for this type of chatbot is the desire […]
I travelled to Seattle last month to present at this conference and had a really great time. I was fortunate enough to be able to present twice, once on two of the micromaterials that I had made (Touchwords and SentenceFactory), and once with Stephanie Hanson, one of my old colleagues from my days as an […]
Not a huge update, but I was finally able to complete adding a bonus round to Touchwords. It now has a time limit and an improved (read: more obvious) input box where the word the student is typing shows up. Another minor improvement is that the score is a running tally throughout all three rounds […]
I’m very happy to announce the release of our finalized API for text resources, active at micromaterials.org. It was envisioned as a step towards making it a bit easier/faster to get simple resources for creating digital EFL learning materials. To hit the main points straight away, this resource is free, authentic, and automatically updated, all things that are integral […]
