Using Irish NLP resources in Primary School Education

This paper looks at the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources in primary school education in Ireland. It shows how two Irish NLP resources, the Irish Finite State Transducer Morphological Engine (IFSTME) (Uí Dhonnchadha, 2002) and Gramadóir (Scannell, 2005) were used as the underlying engines for two Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) resources for Irish. The IFSTME was used to supply verb conjugation information for a Verb Checker Component of a CALL resource, while Gramadóir was the underlying engine for a Writing Checker Component. The paper outlines the motivation behind the development of these resources which include trying to leverage some of the benefits of CALL for students studying Irish in primary school. In order to develop CALL materials that were not just an electronic form of a textbook, it was considered important to incorporate existing NLP resources into the CALL materials. This would have the benefit of not re-inventing the wheel and of using tools that had been designed and testing by a knowledgeable NLP researcher, rather than starting from scratch. The paper reports on the successful development of the CALL resources and some positive feedback from students and teachers. There are several non-technical reasons, mainly logistical, which hinder the deployment of Irish CALL resources in schools, but Irish NLP researchers should strive to disseminate their research and findings to a wider audience than usual, if they wish others to benefit from their work.