Detta examensarbete går ut på att utveckla en webbplats som riktar sig till svenskar som vill lära sig arabiska. Syftet med webbplatsen är att minska tröskeln till att lära sig arabiska. En stor del av arbetet har bestått i att ta del av litteratur om språkinlärning, språkutbildning och datorstödd språkinlärning, samt att studera andra webbplatser. Den webbplats jag har skapat bygger till stor del på en MySQL-databas. Webbplatsen är skapad med PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery och AJAX. Det finns ett gränssnitt där administratörer kan lägga in nya ord och meningar. Orden och meningarna i databasen har lagrats med morfemen åtskilda så långt det är möjligt. En fördel är att det underlättar visualiseringar, utbyggnad av nya funktioner och att det går snabbare för administratörer att lägga in nya ord och meningar. Några av de funktioner som finns på webbplatsen är: Varje ord i ordlistan visas med sina viktigaste böjningsformer. För varje ord kan man se hur det är uppbyggt i bokstäver. För varje ord kan man se vilka meningar det ingår i, för varje mening kan man klicka på valfritt ord för att få mer information om ordet. Varje mening visas både med sin översättning och en ordagrann översättning. Användare kan spara valfria ord och förhöras på dem. För att värdera webbplatsen har jag bland annat genomfört en användarundersökning. Resultatet visar att webbplatsen som helhet är bra och att det finns ett behov av den, samtidigt som utseendet och användarvänligheten kan förbättras. / The aim of this project is to develop a website for swedes that want to learn Arabic. The purpose of the website is to facilitate the learning of Arabic. A large part of the project has been dedicated to study second language acquisition, language education and computer-aided language learning as well as to study other websites. The website I have created is based on a MySQL database. The website is built with PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and AJAX. Apart from the website there is an interface for administrators where they can add words and sentences to the website. The words and sentences in the database are stored so that morphemes are separated as far as possible. An advantage with that solution is that it facilitates visualizations, creation of new functions and that administrators can add new words and sentences with less effort. Some of the functions that the website offers are: Each word in the wordlist are represented with its most common inflections. Each word can be broken up into letters. For each word you can click to find sentences where the word is included, for each sentence you can click on a word to find more information about it. Each sentence are represented with both a translation and a word by word translation. Users can save words and be tested on them. To value the website a survey has been done. The survey shows that the website in general is good and that there is a need for it, while the look and the navigation needs to be improved.

This thesis considers possible criteria for the selection of example sentences for difficult or unknown words in reading texts for students of German as a Second Language (GSL). The examples are intended to be provided within the context of an Intelligent Computer-Aided Language Learning (ICALL) Vocabulary Learning System, where students can choose among several explanation options for difficult words. Some of these options (e.g. glosses) have received a good deal of attention in the ICALL/Second Language (L2) Acquisition literature; in contrast, literature on examples has been the near exclusive province of lexicographers. The selection of examples is explored from an educational, L2 teaching point of view: the thesis is intended as a first exploration of the question of what makes an example helpful to the L2 student from the perspective of L2 teachers. An important motivation for this work is that selecting examples from a dictionary or randomly from a corpus has several drawbacks: first, the number of available dictionary examples is limited; second, the examples fail to take into account the context in which the word was encountered; and third, the rationale and precise principles behind the selection of dictionary examples is usually less than clear. Central to this thesis is the hypothesis that a random selection of example sentences from a suitable corpus can be improved by a guided selection process that takes into account characteristics of helpful examples. This is investigated by an empirical study conducted with teachers of L2 German. The teacher data show that four dimensions are significant criteria amenable to analysis: (a) reduced syntactic complexity, (b) sentence similarity, provision of (c) significant co-occurrences and (d) semantically related words. Models based on these dimensions are developed using logistic regression analysis, and evaluated through two further empirical studies with teachers and students of L2 German. The results of the teacher evaluation are encouraging: for the teacher evaluation, they indicate that, for one of the models, the top-ranked selections perform on the same level as dictionary examples. In addition, the model provides a ranking of potential examples that roughly corresponds to that of experienced teachers of L2 German. The student evaluation confirms and notably improves on the teacher evaluation in that the best-performing model of the teacher evaluation significantly outperforms both random corpus selections and dictionary examples (when a penalty for missing entries is included).

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This thesis documents the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and its contribution to the learning experience of students studying Arabic as a foreign language. The goal of this project is to build an Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) system that provides computational assistance to learners of Arabic by teaching grammar, producing homework and issuing students with immediate feedback. To produce this system we use the Parasite system, which produces morphological, syntactic and semantic analysis of textual input, and extend it to provide error detection and diagnosis. The methodology we adopt involves relaxing constraints on unification so that correct information contained in a badly formed sentence may still be used to obtain a coherent overall analysis. We look at a range of errors, drawn from experience with learners at various levels, covering word internal problems (addition of inappropriate affixes, failure to apply morphotactic rules properly) and problems with relations between words (local constraints on features, and word order problems). As feedback is an important factor in learning, we look into different types of feedback that can be used to evaluate which is the most appropriate for the aim of our system.