Application of spoken corpora to Spanish and Japanese teaching

Period: from July, 1 2009 to June, 30 2010

Principal Investigator in Spain: Antonio Moreno Sandoval (UAM)
Principal Investigator in Japan: Toshihiro Takagaki (Tokio University of Foreign Studies)

The application of computational technology to language teaching is a common and useful task in the Computational Linguistics studies. This project is a proposal of two research groups: the Laboratorio de Lingüística Informática at UAM, in which the Principal Investigator is Prof. A. Moreno Sandoval; and the Programme Usage-based Linguistic Informatics, specifically the development of a multilingual spoken corpus, in which the Spanish subcorpus is managed by Prof. Takagaki. It is an excellence programme funded by the Japanese Government.

Both groups share the Corpus and Computational Linguistics approach in the development of pedagogical resources for language teaching. TUFS created some linguistic modules with pronunciation and grammar for more than 10 languages. The LLI-UAM has just published a book+dvd with Spanish spoken fragments, arranged by grammatical and communicative issues. Also, Prof. Chieko Kimura is working on the development of Japanese materials together with other guest researchers, as Shin Abe and Kengo Matsui, from the Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental.

Project aims

• Collection of recordings of spoken Japanese in Japan.
• Exchange of experiences and methods between the two research groups.
• Enlargement of the existing resources.

Researchers

In Spain:

• UAM: Laboratorio de Lingüística Informática



• Antonio Moreno-Sandoval (Principal Investigator)
• Chieko Kimura (Japanese Adjunct Professor)
• Leonardo Campillos Llanos (PhD Student)
• Paula Gozalo Gómez (Spanish as a second language Professor at the Language Services Center)
• Manuel Alcántara Plá (Associate Professor)
• Marta Garrote Salazar (Associate Researcher)
• Concepción Bueno Díaz-Munio (Programmer)
• Emi Takamori (Assistant Professor)

In Japan:

• Tokyo University of Foreing Studies



• Toshihiro Takagaki (Principal investigator)
• Masami Miyamoto (University Chair, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies)
• Kengo Matsui (PhD Student)
• Haruka Kuno (PhD Student)
• Kentaro Yuki (PhD Student)