=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2844/games4
|storemode=property
|title=Implementing Language Games with NLP Tools: The Greek Case (short paper)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2844/games4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2844
|authors=Christos Tsalidis,Maria Fountana,Monica Gavrielidou,John Stamatopoulos,Aristides Vagelatos
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/setn/TsalidisFGSV20
}}
==Implementing Language Games with NLP Tools: The Greek Case (short paper)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2844/games4.pdf
Implementing Language Games with NLP Tools: The Greek
Case
Christos Maria Monica John Aristides
Tsalidis Fountana Gavrielidou Stamatopoulos Vagelatos
Neurocom S.A. CTI&P CTI&P Neurocom S.A. CTI&P
Athens, Greece Athens, Greece Athens, Greece Athens, Greece Athens, Greece
tsalidis@neuroco fountana@cti.gr monica@cti.gr stamatop@neuro vagelat@cti.gr
m.gr com.gr
ABSTRACT trigger of interest, which are considered consistent with positive
learning results [6].
Digital games, as a popular technology in youth entertainment,
constitute a fast-growing field which has been affecting various In this paper, we examine the needed NLP infrastructure that can
aspects of education for several years now. The research project support the dynamic compilation of educational games for the
“Lexipaignio” focuses on the development of an innovative and Greek language, within the research project “Lexipaignio”.
state-of-the-art NLP (Natural Language Processing) environment
for the creation of digital educational games for Greek students.
A variety of simple and easy-to-play mini-games has been 2 Educational Games
specified aiming to improve students’ linguistic competence by Focusing on Education, the “Lexipaignio” project aims at the
developing a better understanding on various grammatical, utilization and further development of a series of Natural
morphological and vocabulary related phenomena in general, but Language Processing tools (Morphological Lexicon, Lemmatizer,
also in the context of specific subjects (e.g. geology – geography, Mnemosyne language editing system, corpus of Greek school
biology, etc.). In this paper, the main functionalities of the NLP subjects, etc.), for the implementation of dynamically created
environment will be presented towards the implementation of gamified educational material. The paper highlights the creation
mini-games for the Greek language. of mini-games related to the subject of Greek language in schools.
Being part of an ongoing project, the development of language
CCS CONCEPTS mini-games will provide us with useful feedback regarding the use
• Computer games • Natural Language Processing of NLP for the development of dynamic gamified materials in
many school subjects.
KEYWORDS
According to relevant research [2, 8], computer games provide a
Educational Games, NLP, Game-based Learning quick and interesting learning pace in contrast to the conventional
teaching methods and in this perspective, they can affect the
dynamics as far as digital learning is concerned. The purpose of
1 Introduction
the ongoing project is the development of an innovative and state-
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is not really a new research of-the-art computational environment through the creation of
field since the first effort started in the 1950s with the so called digital educational games for students (primary and secondary
“Turing test”. Nevertheless, it took more than three decades of level) in order to: a) improve language competence and overall
research work in order to have real progress with substantial level of students’ knowledge and b) develop various vocabulary
results. Nowadays NLP (which in fact is part of AI) is a research and linguistic skills, while understanding the context of specific
area that gains extreme interest mainly due to the enormous school subjects (biology, geography etc.).
amount of data that are produced every single minute in digital
format: the ability to process information and transform it to The new environment will support the automated production of
knowledge is of great value in today’s “information jungle” [1]. questions related to different levels of competency as far as the
Greek language structure and its use are concerned in terms of
On the other hand, the use of digital games to support learning spelling, morphology, vocabulary, as well as terminology found in
(game-based learning) through an alternative, more attractive school textbooks which is integrated into the overall environment
way is rapidly developing in both European and worldwide level. and narration of digital educational games. It will also enable
Obviously, digital games is a fast developing field, as it is amongst teachers to automatically create a large volume of questions
the most popular technologies young people use to amuse through their insertion in educational games (crosswords, match
themselves. The educational potential of digital games is games, multiple choice, scrabble games, word search puzzles, etc.)
correlated to the properties of motivation, amusement and the and at the same time, it will be possible for them to control
GAITECUS0, September 02–04, 2020, Athens, Greece
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons
License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
parameters such as: a) school subject (biology, geography, o keyword extraction (application of TF/IDF
literature etc.), b) grade, c) grammatical phenomena (conjugation, algorithms)
spelling, syntax, vocabulary). We believe that the proposed
o extraction of candidate terms (application of
environment can become a successful tool in supporting and
morphosyntactic patterns that followed by
enriching the educational process in an appealing and attractive
terms)
way. As far as language teaching is concerned, the traditional
approach which is mainly restricted to the teaching of rules and At the runtime, the system after modelling the functionality and
is exhausted in monotonous exercises for the students on the the data needed by a rich set of games useful in education, offers
assumption that the language is a one-dimensional teaching several NLP functions that can feed the games through web
object, seems not to convey the expected results and should be services API. Examples of services supported are:
redefined on the basis of modern functional and communicative
teaching approaches. ● predetermined word lists from preparation phase,
● fuzzy matching using spelling checker engine,
3 NLP Infrastructure ● synonyms and antonyms using thesaurus engine,
For the needs of the “Lexipaignio” project various Language ● inflection of nouns, adjectives, verbs, …
Resources and NLP technologies are used, to create a Web
● morphology of words with decomposition in
Services API to support the operational requirements of
hyphenation, formation using morphemes,
educational games [10, 11]. In the backend “Mnemosyne” platform
[3] is utilized in pre-processing and runtime phase (see Fig. 1). ● grammatical checking using grammar checker, etc.
Mnemosyne incorporates a vast number of language resources
and technologies including a) many different dictionaries, e.g.
spelling vocabularies, morphology, thesaurus, gazetteers, and b) 4 Language Games
“classic” NLP technologies like fuzzy matching engines, stemmers,
The focus of Lexipaignio educational mini-games relates to the
taggers, syntax checkers. Besides the “standard” technologies, the
improvement of language competency level and linguistic abilities
environment offers “modern” NLP and machine learning
of upper primary and lower secondary Greek students. To this, an
functionality as classification mechanisms such as K-Means and
initial study of categorization of grammatical phenomena and
Hierarchical clustering algorithms, keyword extraction and
common linguistic errors was conducted.
indexing using TF/IDF and BM25 algorithms [7], text production
A common mistake in Modern Greek relates to the application of
using n-gram language models [9]. At the top of the stack,
conjugation rules in adjectives ending in “-ης” and “-ες” (πλήρης
Mnemosyne implements several supervised and unsupervised
– πλήρες). These adjectives are of increased difficulty level due to
machine learning algorithms such as Naïve-Bayes and
a particularity in the formation of some masculine and feminine
Multinomial Linear Regression, as well as word embeddings using
types. Such difficulties are noted in terms of spelling, word
CBOW & SKIPGRAM algorithms [4] as well as GLOVE algorithm
formation, as well as word use in sentences.
[5].
As a step forward, a Greek Language corpus was compiled, which,
The above models have been applied on a corpus of more than
along with the NLP components served as a basis for the creation
1.5G words collected from electronic news, movies subtitles,
of the educational mini-games. The Greek Language corpus
literature books, legislation documents, etc. The NLP
comprised of all the material included in the Greek Language
infrastructure is used in two consequent phases: 1) the
books studied in upper primary and lower secondary Greek school
preparation phase where the teacher must prepare the data for the
in the context of the Modern Greek language course.
gamified lessons and 2) the runtime phase when the games run
The use of adjectives in “-ης” and “-ες” in NLP educational mini-
and asks for data.
games resulted from a thorough study on grammar exercise
In the preparation phase the functionality supported includes: typologies and their possible applications to the suggested
grammatical phenomena and common linguistic mistakes. Next,
● queries to language resources, e.g. morphosyntactic the above typologies were considered regarding mini-game
dictionary for adjectives ending in “-ης” and “–ες” (see alternative solutions.
following section)
In the case of adjectives in “-ης” and “-ες”, the above led to the
● the incorporation of a document collection with construction of a series of mini-games regarding True/False,
educational material and extraction of: multiple choice, word creation, list creation, gap filling, text
o n-gram language models, processing and text checking.
o clusters of similar documents (application of Based on the produced infrastructure, the teacher can create
K-Means and hierarchical clustering his/her own games by selecting a) the grammatical phenomenon
algorithms) of interest, b) the level of difficulty and c) a certain text that he/she
is willing to use.
[10] Tsalidis, C., Vagelatos, A., Orphanos, G.: An electronic dictionary as a basis for
NLP tolls: The Greek case. In Proc. Of 11th Conference on Natural Language
Pro-cessing, Fez, Morocco (2004).
[11] Vagelatos, A., Mantzari, E., Pantazara, M., Tsalidis, Ch., Kalamara, C.:
Developing tools and resources for the biomedical domain of the Greek
language. Health Informatics Journal, 17(2), 127-139 (2011).
Figure 1: Mnemosyne platform, with morphosyntactic
analysis of a text from the corpus.
5 Conclusions
With the aim to deploy Natural Language Processing
infrastructure for the creation of educational games in a variety of
school subjects (Geography, Modern Greek Language, Biology),
so far, the language processing techniques applied in
“Lexipaignio” project provide encouraging results. Regarding the
implementation of the appropriate infrastructure for dynamic
educational games, we hope that soon educators will be able to
easily create mini-games according to their students’ needs, by
regulating the game content.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research has been co-financed by the European Regional
Development Fund of the European Union and Greek national
funds through the Operational Program Competitiveness,
Entrepreneurship and Innovation, under the call RESEARCH –
CREATE – INNOVATE (project code: T1EDK-05094).
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