Phraseological Database Extended by Educational Material for Learning Scientific Style

Phraseological Database Extended by Educational
Material for Learning Scientific Style

Elena
I.
Bolshakova
Center of Computer Investigations (CIC), National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), Mexico City, Mexico
elena@pollux.cic.ipn.mx

2001

New York University

New York, NY

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

Literary styles, as well as specialized sublanguages, accomplishing
communicative goals in particular fields of human activity, share main
features of natural language as a whole, and at the same time demonstrates
some deviations from it, with respect to their syntax, morphology, and
lexicon (Grishman and Kittredge 1986). As a rule, each functional style has
its own phraseology, i.e. a system of word stereotypes (cliche) exploited as
stable colloquial formulas that are ready for use and thus optimize
communication.
Among the others, the functional style of scientific and technical (sci-tech)
prose is admittedly the most distinctive one, primarily due to the intensive
use of scientific phraseology including special sci-tech terms (Mitrofanova
1973). The style covers documents of various genres and particular types -
manual, research paper, technical report, instructions, patents, etc.
Scientific phraseology provides economical ways to express ideas in sci-tech
texts with their factuality, informativeness, and precision.
Teaching and learning literary styles is of great importance not only for
students in the humanities, but also for students in technical and natural
sciences. Student's competence in particular fields should be supplemented
with the ability to write sci-tech documents of a sufficiently high quality.
Thus, education in technical and natural sciences should include some
humanity knowledge, in particular, knowledge of scientific style.
Phraseology of specialized scientific sublanguages includes both sci-tech
terms and the common scientific phraseology. Acquiring the latter presents
the major difficulty in learning scientific style, because terms can be
usually found in specialized dictionaries, while there are few available
dictionaries of typical scientific phraseological expressions. However,
students need certain educational information or/and an assistant system for
acquiring scientific phraseology.
We describe a computer system being under development over a period of two
years and integrating phraseological database of Russian scientific language
and explanatory educational material. It is intended to help students to
improve their linguistic competence in the scientific style and genres and
belongs to hybrid computer systems supporting both process of sci-tech
writing and learning its fundamentals. Another example of such hybrid
systems is an experimental system described in (Bolshakova 2000). While
designing the phraseology database, the principles of several computer
lexical databases were considered (Fellbaum 1998, Bolshakov 1994).

Features of the System
>From the user's point of view, the system can be regarded as a linguistic
database supplied with a computer reference guide accumulating general
explanatory information about scientific style and phraseology. Text of the
guide has been specially written and structured for representation in
hypertext form, since usefulness of hypertext for learning is well
acknowledged (Brusilovsky 1996).
Thus, each page of the reference guide presents a relatively independent
topic and is connected by hypertext links with another pages of the guide
and pages presenting items of the phraseology database. In turn, hypertext
pages with phraseological expressions are both interconnected and connected
with guide pages explaining necessary concepts. Besides browsing through
various pages, the search of phraseological expressions containing fixed
words can be made, resulting in a relevant page.
The system is flexibly organized: it allow a free navigation through pages of
the reference guide and of the phraseological database, thus enabling to
view the information in a desirable sequence. At the same time, a student
can learn the educational material in a predetermined systemic way
recommended for beginners. Such flexibility envisioned by a liberal
humanities viewpoint proved to be more effective learning strategy.

Covered Phraseology
Phraseology represented in the database was gathered from several textual
dictionaries of common scientific phraseology - see, for example, (DICT
1973) and then complemented by phraseological data obtained through manual
scanning of scientific texts in several fields.
Units of common scientific phraseology, including domain independent word
stereotypes and colloquial templates specific for particular scientific
genres, was systemized and arranged according to their functions in texts.
The biggest group of expressions concerns words regarded as common
scientific variables, e.g. "problem", "analysis", "result". For instance,
phraseological expressions with such variables are: "objective analysis
shows/yields ", "to question the results". Another group presents units of
metatext character, designing and organizing scientific text narrative. It
includes expressions serving as connectors of different textual parts ("in
addition", "mentioned above", etc.), expressions indicating information
source (like "in their/our opinion"), and estimating expressions (e.g., "it
seems reasonable").
Each item of the phraseological database integrates all semantically
equivalent variants (synonyms) of a particular expression that are described
by a semantico-syntactic pattern with associated information including an
explanation of its meaning and examples of typical sentences exploiting it.
Empty valences of the expression are indicated in the pattern, with
specification of their semantic roles.

Conclusions
We have described both the methodological framework and the main features of
a computer system intended for learning phraseology of Russian sci-tech
texts. Its interrelated components, i.e. phraseology database and
educational material represented in hypertext form, are partially
implemented with the aid of Borland Delphi environment tools.
Among directions of system improvement being now under consideration we
should point out further extension of phraseology lexicon. Text corpora
reflecting contemporary sci-tech language usage will supposedly be
exploited, since features of any style and sublanguage can be revealed
exhaustively on the basis of corpus analysis (Biber et al. 1998).
Another direction concerns merging into a common database of scientific
phraseologies of several natural languages. Preliminary comparative study of
scientific phraseology of Russian, English, and Spanish languages shows an
evident similarity of their word stereotypes. This fact can be used for the
systematical computer-aided teaching of foreign scientific phraseology.

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