OpenCon 2018

The open source FLAX [1] language project team have developed an application called F-Lingo [2]. Implemented as a Chrome extension, F-Lingo works on top of FutureLearn – an online MOOC platform – to help you learn about selected words, phrases, and concepts in the text you're reading. This presentation will introduce the F-Lingo Chrome extension currently under study with learners enrolled in FutureLearn’s Practical Data Mining [3] courses. This study aims to address whether integrating language tools into an online MOOC platform can supplement learning.

Once F-Lingo has identified keywords, phrases, and concepts within text, it provides an interactive interface for gaining further information about each, such as definitions, example sentences, and related collocations. For keywords, definitions are retrieved from Wiktionary and example sentences are derived from both the content of the course and the British Library’s Open Access E-theses collections [4]. For phrases, both example sentences and related collocations are derived from the FLAX Wikipedia collection. Finally, concept descriptions and related concepts are retrieved from Wikipedia using the Wikipedia Miner toolkit [5].

F-Lingo has been developed by Jemma König in her PhD project at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Using it will help her gather experimental usage data for her PhD. If you want to see what F-Lingo does without installing it, this 3-minute video on YouTube [6] illustrates its facilities.

[1] flax.nzdl.org
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/flingo
[3] https://www.futurelearn.com/programs/data-mining
[4] http://flax.nzdl.org/greenstone3/flax?a=b&rt=r&s=ClassifierBrowse&cl=CL1&c=PAAH&if=flax
[5] D. Milne and I. H. Witten, “An open-source toolkit for mining Wikipedia,” Artificial Intelligence, vol. 194, pp. 222-239, 2013.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=58&v=FRGwuexvkus