Submissions/Language learners expanding Wiktionary, building better language processing tools

This is an Open submission for Wikimania 2017 that has not yet been reviewed by a member of the Programme Committee.

Submission no. 8011 - C8

Title of the submission: Language learners expanding Wiktionary, building better language processing tools

Type of submission (lecture, panel, tutorial/workshop, roundtable discussion, lightning talk, poster, birds of a feather discussion): Lecture

Author of the submission: Jake Ryland Williams

Language of presentation: English

E-mail address: jw3477{{@}}drexel.edu

Username: jakerylandwilliams

Country of origin: United States

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): Drexel University

Personal homepage or blog: http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~jw3477/

Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal): Wiktionary provides invaluable services to broad communities of users. Native speakers and language learners alike rely on Wiktionary’s extensive, growing dictionaries for vocabulary expansion and language understanding, and the language processing community sees Wiktionary’s potential for use in the development of valuable services such as machine translation. The semi-structured Wiktionary data is challenging to use for the development of tools, perhaps most of all because the collaborative and crowd-sourced nature of wikis create variation in format. However, this nature is what has fueled Wikimedia projects to the tremendous scale and utility that we experience today. Thus, we propose how developments for Wiktionary’s use in language processing should synergize with this crowd-sourced nature. Following a data products design, we identify how the creation of a MediWiki extension providing language understanding and fluency development services for language learners can optimize the use of Wiktionary for language processing tools while simultaneously growing Wiktionary’s base of definitions and example usages. This three-way synergy (building Wiktionary, increasing learner’s fluency, and developing processing tools) may serve as an example for future work that could lead to a suite of open source language processing tools powered by Wikimedia projects.

What will attendees take away from this session?: Attendees will learn about alternative ways in which Wiktionary can be expanded and used, along with its data used. Through discussion, attendees will shape a problem's solution benefiting Wiktionary, language learners, and the research community in language processing.

Theme of presentation: Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

For workshops and discussions, what level is the intended audience?: NA

Length of session (if other than 25 minutes, specify how long): 25 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests: None

Is this Submission a Draft or Final?

This is a Completed submission for Wikimania 2017 ready to be reviewed by a member of the Programme Committee.

Interested attendees

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Amir É. Aharoni (talk) 11:23, 11 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Andicat (talk) 20:57, 1 May 2017 (UTC) if I am able to attend![reply]
N2e, 6 May 2017 (UTC) quite interested in attending, but may only be able to attend Wikimania on 9, 10 and morning of the 11th.
Noé (talk) 12:27, 19 May 2017 (UTC), great, that's a challenging topic and this talk may be a great adding to the Category:Wiktionary presentations![reply]