Activities

Computational Linguistics is crucial for development of high information technologies, necessary for social and civilizational progress.  Its technologies are in progress almost everywhere in the world but at low speed in UZ and KZ.

Milestones of the 1st year:

• Established local working groups and action plan
• Project kick-off meeting
• Training on Bologna process
• Defining key units to manage and monitor activities
• Enriching English knowledge on needed sections
• Purchasing equipment
• Constructing the curriculum and competence model of a Computational Linguistics
• Staff training in blended learning and computational linguistics
• Developing curriculum content materials on specialized courses based on blended learning
• Established dissemination plan
• Project web-site created and maintained
• QA monitoring and the presenting reports in meeting
• Managing of the distributed work packages activities among the partners

Project kick-off meeting is important to distribute roles and responsibilities for Project Quality Assurance Committee, which monitor and control the project activities, its implementation via special report templates and report events.

ENU and NUUz will analyze the content of the developed international master program courses, tools, while AMU via the analysis will develop the instructions for the curriculum content development.

USC will be responsible for developing the training plan for enhancing capacity of about 70 academic staff on Structural English in the sections of morphology, syntactic and semantics. The activity for training will be carried out in all CA partner university covering 144 academic hours.

All CA partner university will participate in the curriculum development in order to customize the instructions of AMU and convert the ECTS to national academic hours. Here, UrSU and KSU have an experience that is obtained in ECCUM project. U.PORTO accumulates the available resources to analyse and present existing Computational Linguistics master programs.

In the next phase, 5 academics staff from each CA partner university will have the mobility to UDC partner for training on using NLP tools and blended learning technology in teaching process. This staff will also participate in development of the curriculum content materials under appointed partners AMU, U.PORTO and UDC. After the six month, the semester meeting will be carried out in CA partner NUUz for establishing the next six month action plan and the dissemination plan as well as presenting the reports. The constructing and maintaining  of the web site will be realized by UWA.

According to the first year work plan, the activities that should be executed are belonging mostly to WP1, WP2, WP4, WP5 and WP6. Therefore, to assemble reports operatively, each WP management will be organised separately.

Milestones of the 2nd year:

• Modular Study programme elaborated and reviewed\ accredited
• Open online Courses are developed
• Professional training of academic staff in linguistics and IT specialty for developing NLP tools
• Disseminating and sharing materials are developed

WP 2 describes the activities and outcomes on developing master programme, its syllabuses, defining its content. When the program is ready, an external will  revise and provide written feedback and submit it to the Ministries of partner countries. The Master's program might be composed of the following modules:

• Linguistic analysis: PoS tagging, syntactic analysis, discourse analysis, shallow semantics, etc.
• Text mining and information extraction: relation extraction, keywords and multiword extraction, named entity recognition, entity linking, etc.
• NLP applications: machine translation, question-answering, information retrieval, linguistic correction (spell and grammar checkers), summarization, etc.

If students are coming from different fields (computer sciences and linguistics), the master should also provide basic courses to let students reach appropriate levels. In this case, the Master could offer:

• Scripting programming (e.g. Python or Perl) for linguists.
• Basic courses in Syntax and Semantics in English, Uzbek and Kazakh language for computer scientists. The modules of the master program will be designed for blended learning. The AMU with associate partners will assist in and monitor the creation of online courses in CA partner universities.

Professional training of Linguist and IT academics staff on methodologies and strategies for developing NLP tools will be organised by AMU. This partner also will provide with instructions, recommendations and supervise the development of activities of NLP tools.

As master program will be launched in the third year, the materials for disseminating and sharing should be prepared. In this purpose all CA partners will prepare e-books, methodological books and video rollers in Uzbek and Kazakh languages. UniWA will create two video rollers in order to present European teaching approaches and experiences in Computational linguistics. These video rollers could be used as material for the class on introduction to Computational linguistics. Each CA partner university will be responsible to create the video roller presenting the one specialized course.

Milestones of year 3:

• Modular master programme is implemented, using blended learning
• QA of the launched master program and results information disseminated
• 4 NLP tools are developed

The developed NLP tools will serve to academic purposes as well as for research and the needs of stakeholders. At the same time, it also provides the sustainability of the project and continues disseminating the master program on the field of the Computational Linguistics.

The consortium agreed to competence-based and module-based approach in conformity with Bologna principles and in teaching blended-learning strategy, project-based learning; learning-by-doing methods will be applied.