Free ebook available: Breaking the Language Barrier: A Game-Changing Approach v0.18

[Ziyuan Yao]

Dear All,

I'm pleased to announce my free ebook "Breaking the Language Barrier: A Game-Changing Approach", version 0.18. The ebook has undergone significant updates since its initial release (version 0.09 in April 2010). Almost every part has significant new developments, so I suggest existing readers take it anew.

Perhaps nothing can explain this ebook better than its own Overview and Table of Contents, which are attached below.

View or download it (free) from:

https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/publications/books/breaking-the-language-barrier-a-game-changing-approach

Best Regards,

Ziyuan Yao

https://sites.google.com/site/yaoziyuan/

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Overview

In today's world, the goal of breaking the language barrier is pursued on two fronts: language teachers teaching students a second language, thus enabling humans to manually break the language barrier, and computational linguists building increasingly better machine translation systems to automatically break the language barrier. 

However, I see important, unfulfilled opportunities on both fronts: 

In second language teaching, amazingly efficient teaching methods have not gone mainstream and not drawn enough attention from computational linguists (so that these methods could be automated and truly powerful). For example, imagine if you're browsing a Web page in your native language, and a Web browser extension automatically detects the topic of this page and inserts relevant foreign language micro-lessons in it, so that you can incidentally learn a foreign language while browsing interesting native language information :-) This AdSense-like "L1-driven L2 teaching" will be the future of second language teaching.

In machine translation, computational linguists only pay attention to computer capabilities to process natural language (known as natural language processing, NLP), and totally ignore human capabilities to share some burden from the computer in language processing, which can lead to significantly better results. For example, it is perceived that Google Translate does word sense disambiguation quite well, but tends to screw up the word order of the translation result if the language pair has disparate word orders; what if machine translation preserves the source language's word order in the translation result, and teaches the end user about the source language's word order so that he can manually figure out the logic of the translation result? If the end user is willing to commit some of his own natural intelligence in the man-machine joint effort to break the language barrier, he will get the job done better.

Therefore this ebook presents emerging ideas and implementations in computer-assisted language learning (CALL), reading, writing and machine translation (MT) that strive to leverage both human and machine language processing potential and capabilities, and will redefine the way people break the language barrier.

Approaches whose titles have an exclamation mark (!) are stirring game-changing technologies which are the driving forces behind this initiative.

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Table of Contents

Overview    3

Chapter 1: Breaking the Language Barrier with Language Learning    4

1.1. Foreign Language Acquisition    4

1.1.1. L1-Driven L2 Teaching! (L1DL2T)    4

1.1.1.1. The Idea    4

1.1.1.2. Historical Developments    6

1.1.1.3. An Example System Design    8

1.1.1.3.1. Overview    8

1.1.1.3.2. ATLAS Mission Profiles    9

1.1.1.3.3. ATLAS User Profiles    15

1.1.1.3.4. Data Acquisition Strategies    17

1.1.2. Word Mnemonics    17

1.1.2.1. Essential Mnemonics    18

1.1.2.1.1. Phonetically Intuitive English! (PIE)    18

1.1.2.1.2. Etymology and Free Association    22

1.1.2.1.3. Why Are They Essential? A Proof    23

1.1.2.2. Other Mnemonics    24

1.1.2.2.1. Orthographically Intuitive English (OIE)    24

1.1.2.2.2. Progressive Word Acquisition (PWA)    25

1.1.2.3. Principles Learned    26

1.2. Foreign Language Writing Aids    27

1.2.1. Predictive vs. Corrective Writing Aids    27

1.2.2. Input-Driven Syntax Aid! (IDSA)    27

1.2.3. Input-Driven Ontology Aid! (IDOA)    28

1.3. Foreign Language Reading Aids    28

Chapter 2: Breaking the Language Barrier with Little Learning    30

2.1. Foreign Language Understanding    30

2.1.1. Syntax-Preserving Machine Translation! (SPMT)    30

2.2. Foreign Language Generation    32

2.2.1. Formal Language Machine Translation! (FLMT)    33