Presented at the TESOL 2015 Electronic Village Developers' Showcase Event in Toronto on March 26, 2015.

1. The Open-Source FLAX Language System
Alannah Fitzgerald
Shaoqun Wu
Ian H. Witten
Xiaofeng Yu

2. The eBook of FLAX
“FLAX (Flexible Language Acquisition) is
both a vision and a tool that you can use for
language learning. The Web contains
innumerable language activities, quizzes,
and games, but they are fixed: the activities
are cast in stone and the material is chosen
by others. Our vision is to put the control
back where it belongs, in the hands of
teachers and learners.”

3. WHO ARE WE IN THIS FLAX
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
COLLABORATION?

4. FLAX Language at Waikato University
http://flax.nzdl.org FLAX image by permission of non-commercial reuse by Jane Galloway

5. FLAX Language Project at the
Greenstone Digital Library Lab,
Waikato University NZ
Professor Ian Witten
FLAX Project Lead
Dr Shaoqun Wu
FLAX Project Lead Researcher & Developer

6. Research on Open FLAX Collections
http://oerresearchhub.org/
Alannah Fitzgerald
Open Fellow with OERRH
FLAX Language & Open
Education Researcher

7. OPEN SOURCE LANGUAGE TOOLS
DEVELOPMENT

8. FLAX Digital
Library
Collections
Collocations
database
Glossary
Open
Educational
Resources

9. Google-esque Interface Designs
Designed for the non-expert corpus user, namely:
learners, teachers, subject academics, instructional
designers and language resource developers.

10. Introducing the Wikipedia Miner Toolkit
(Milne & Witten, 2013)

11. Building Interactivity into
FLAX Language Collections

12. FLAX Activities Continued

13. Free Android Apps

14. FLAX Across Platforms
• FLAX Website flax.nzdl.org for hosting open online
language collections
• Building directly onto the Web with OER
• FLAX multilingual open-source software for download
• Set up your own FLAX server online or;
• Build collections offline for use on your PC
• FLAX Android app for download
• Interact with game-based FLAX collections while on the go
• FLAX for MOODLE plug-in for download
• FLAX for MOOC Platforms?
• FLAX in conjunction with translation technologies?

15. DOMAIN-SPECIFIC OPEN
LANGUAGE COLLECTIONS BUILDING

17. The eBook of FLAX
“FLAX enables teachers to build bespoke
libraries very easily. It is built upon powerful
digital library technology, and provides access to
vast linguistic resources containing countless
examples of actual, authentic, usage in
contemporary text. But teachers can also build
collections using their own material, focusing
on language learning in a particular domain
(e.g., business, law) or motivating students by
using text from a particular context (e.g.,
country or region, common interests).”

18. Working with Full Texts

19. Wikify Your Collections

20. Domain-specific Collocations
We focus on lexical collocations with noun-based
structures because they are the most salient and
important patterns in domain-specific text.
Collocations from the English Common Law MOOC:
• verb + noun e.g. abolish judicial review
• noun + noun e.g. precedent case
• adjective + noun e.g. common law
• noun + of + noun e.g. court of appeal

21. Lexical Bundles
“Lexical bundles” are multi-word sequences with distinctive
syntactic patterns and discourse functions that are commonly
used in academic prose (Biber & Barbieri, 2007; Biber et al,
2003, 2004).
Bundles from British Law Report Corpus (BLaRC):
• noun phrase + of e.g. In the course of his
• prepositional phrase + of e.g. on the part of the
• it + verb/adjective phrase e.g. it is common ground that
• be + noun/adjective phrase e.g. be taken into account in
• verb phrase + that e.g. There is no doubt that

22. Lexical Bundles

23. Collocations Within Collections

24. Linking to the FLAX Learning Collocations
Collection (Wikipedia, BNC, BAWE)

25. Good Ol’ Part-Of-Speech Tagging

26. References
• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2003). Lexical bundles in
speech and writing: an initial taxonomy. In A. Wilson, P.
Rayson, & T. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus linguistics by the lune:
A festschrift for Geoffrey Leech (pp. 71–92).
Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
• Biber, D., Conrad, S., & Cortes, V. (2004). If you look at . . .:
lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks.
Applied Linguistics, 25, 371–405. Biber, D. (2006). University
Language, A corpus-based study of spoken and written
registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
• Biber, D., Barbieri F. (2007). Lexical bundles in university
spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purpose,
26, 263–286.
• Milne, D. & Witten, I.H. (2013). An open-source toolkit for
mining Wikipedia. Artificial Intelligence, 194, 222-239.

27. Look Out for FLAX in April with
Russell Stannard’s - Teacher Training Videos
http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com

28. Thank You
FLAX Language Project & Software Downloads: http://flax.nzdl.org/
The How-to eBook of FLAX: http://flax-
doc.nzdl.org/BOOK_OF_FLAX/BookofFLAX%20fullsize%20with%20links.pdf
FLAX Game-based Apps for Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=FLAX%20TEAM&hl=en
Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca
Shaoqun Wu: shaoqun@waikato.ac.nz
Ian Witten: ihw@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Xiaofeng (Alex) Yu: Alex.Yu@wintec.ac.nz
OER Research Hub: http://oerresearchhub.org/
TOETOE Technology for Open English Blog: www.alannahfitzgerald.org
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
Twitter: @AlannahFitz