Providing a Natural Language Processing App for Language Teachers

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a common application for Artificial Intelligence. The goal is to provide language teachers with a simple to apply tool for topic model analyses to integrate into their classroom. The project also involves project based learning for students programming the actual AI web application. The original notion is to provide language teacher with AI methodology without requiring any technical knowledge in AI or any programming skills. Natural Language Processing provides various tools for word frequencies, but also topic modelling, allowing to track the relevance of topics over time in the media or in the literature. In collaboration with University of Technology linguistics, we intend to provide a corpus of classical English and German literature, as well as the option of uploading your own corpus which can be obtained from webscraping or other sources. A team of students of the vocational high school TGM Wien specialised in IT and Software Development is working on the design of the interactive GUI for this NLP application, learning in this way the methods of Natural Language Processing and Artrificial Intelligence in a project based setting. For this the statistical programming language R is utilized which already provides packages with implementation for Natural Language Processing and in addition the shiny package which allows to develop interactie web apps without additional web and app programming. A team of teachers supervises and supports the students during the development process, providing expertise in AI and NLP, in web and app programming, as well as server management. Two intended outcomes exist. Ont the one hand, we want our students to learn Natural Language Processing first hand through development of this application. On the other hand, we intend to obtain an interactive AI tool which can assist language teachers and their students on the long term in the classroom. In times of GPT3 and GPT4 dominating the media and perception of Artificial Intelligence, we intend to teach students about the methodology involved first hand by having them participate in the development of such an interactive application for Natural Language Processing. Through a project based learning approach, we involve them in all steps of the development over a times of one and a half years, two school years. The final product of this project is an interactive web application for topic modelling and visualising word frequency counts in various ways.