Emerging Technologies of Elastic Clouds and Treebanks: New Opportunities for Content-Based and Data-Driven Language Learning (Report‪)‬

Creating effective electronic tools for language learning frequently requires large data sets containing extensive examples of actual human language use. Collections of authentic language in spoken and written forms provide developers the means to enrich their applications with real world examples. As the Internet continues to expand exponentially, the vast "cloud" of Web pages created provides a nearly inexhaustible and continuously updated language bank, particularly in English. The issue remains, however, of how to make practical use of large amounts of data for language learning, given storage and data processing demands. Recently, new developments in storage virtualization and distributed computing offer practical solutions, as demonstrated by Amazon's Elastic Computer Cloud and SimpleDB. At the same time, the move to XML encoding of language corpora and text collections provides the compatibility and interchange which has hampered their practical exploitation for language learning. Tools are also being created to facilitate the transformation of text collections into more usable formats, particularly into syntactically annotated corpora called treebanks. These developments offer opportunities for content-based language learning in particular. GROWTH IN CONTENT-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING