TYPE OF PROPOSAL: Poster
TYTLE:
Phraseological Database Extended by Educational Material
for Learning Scientific Style

KEYWORDS: lexical database, phraseology, educational material
AUTHOR: Elena I. Bolshakova
AFFILIATION: Center of Computer Investigations (CIC), National Polytechnic Institute (IPN),
Mexico City, Mexico
E-MAIL: elena@pollux.cic.ipn.mx
FAX NUMBER: +(52) 5586-2936
PHONE NUMBER: +(52) 5729-6000 ext. 56589
CONTACT ADRESS: CIC-IPN, Av. Juan de Dios Bat』, Esq. Miguel Ot▋ Mendiz bal, U.P.
Adolfo L▉ez Mateos; Zacatenco, C.P. 07738; Mexico, D. F., Mexico

Literary styles, as well as specialized sublanguages, accomplishing communicative goals in
particular fields of human activity, share main features of natural language as a whole, and at the
same time demonstrates some deviations from it, with respect to their syntax, morphology, and
lexicon (Grishman and Kittredge 1986). As a rule, each functional style has its own phraseology,
i.e. a system of word stereotypes (cliche) exploited as stable colloquial formulas that are ready for
use and thus optimize communication.
Among the others, the functional style of scientific and technical (sci-tech) prose is
admittedly the most distinctive one, primarily due to the intensive use of scientific phraseology
including special sci-tech terms (Mitrofanova 1973). The style covers documents of various genres
and particular types - manual, research paper, technical report, instructions, patents, etc. Scientific
phraseology provides economical ways to express ideas in sci-tech texts with their factuality,
informativeness, and precision.
Teaching and learning literary styles is of great importance not only for students in the
humanities, but also for students in technical and natural sciences. Student's competence in
particular fields should be supplemented with the ability to write sci-tech documents of a
sufficiently high quality. Thus, education in technical and natural sciences should include some
humanity knowledge, in particular, knowledge of scientific style.
Phraseology of specialized scientific sublanguages includes both sci-tech terms and the
common scientific phraseology. Acquiring the latter presents the major difficulty in learning
scientific style, because terms can be usually found in specialized dictionaries, while there are few
available dictionaries of typical scientific phraseological expressions. However, students need
certain educational information or/and an assistant system for acquiring scientific phraseology.
We describe a computer system being under development over a period of two years and
integrating phraseological database of Russian scientific language and explanatory educational
material. It is intended to help students to improve their linguistic competence in the scientific style
and genres and belongs to hybrid computer systems supporting both process of sci-tech writing and
learning its fundamentals. Another example of such hybrid systems is an experimental system
described in (Bolshakova 2000). While designing the phraseology database, the principles of
several computer lexical databases were considered (Fellbaum 1998, Bolshakov 1994).

Features of the System
>From the user's point of view, the system can be regarded as a linguistic database supplied with a
computer reference guide accumulating general explanatory information about scientific style and
phraseology. Text of the guide has been specially written and structured for representation in
hypertext form, since usefulness of hypertext for learning is well acknowledged
(Brusilovsky 1996).
Thus, each page of the reference guide presents a relatively independent topic and is
connected by hypertext links with another pages of the guide and pages presenting items of the
phraseology database. In turn, hypertext pages with phraseological expressions are both
interconnected and connected with guide pages explaining necessary concepts. Besides browsing
through various pages, the search of phraseological expressions containing fixed words can be
made, resulting in a relevant page.
The system is flexibly organized: it allow a free navigation through pages of the reference
guide and of the phraseological database, thus enabling to view the information in a desirable
sequence. At the same time, a student can learn the educational material in a predetermined
systemic way recommended for beginners. Such flexibility envisioned by a liberal humanities
viewpoint proved to be more effective learning strategy.

Covered Phraseology
Phraseology represented in the database was gathered from several textual dictionaries of common
scientific phraseology - see, for example, (DICT 1973) and then complemented by phraseological
data obtained through manual scanning of scientific texts in several fields.
Units of common scientific phraseology, including domain independent word stereotypes
and colloquial templates specific for particular scientific genres, was systemized and arranged
according to their functions in texts. The biggest group of expressions concerns words regarded as
common scientific variables, e.g. "problem", "analysis", "result". For instance, phraseological
expressions with such variables are: "objective analysis shows/yields ", "to question the results".
Another group presents units of metatext character, designing and organizing scientific text
narrative. It includes expressions serving as connectors of different textual parts ("in addition",
"mentioned above", etc.), expressions indicating information source (like "in their/our opinion"),
and estimating expressions (e.g., "it seems reasonable").
Each item of the phraseological database integrates all semantically equivalent variants
(synonyms) of a particular expression that are described by a semantico-syntactic pattern with
associated information including an explanation of its meaning and examples of typical sentences
exploiting it. Empty valences of the expression are indicated in the pattern, with specification of
their semantic roles.

Conclusions
We have described both the methodological framework and the main features of a computer system
intended for learning phraseology of Russian sci-tech texts. Its interrelated components, i.e.
phraseology database and educational material represented in hypertext form, are partially
implemented with the aid of Borland Delphi environment tools.
Among directions of system improvement being now under consideration we should point
out further extension of phraseology lexicon. Text corpora reflecting contemporary sci-tech
language usage will supposedly be exploited, since features of any style and sublanguage can be
revealed exhaustively on the basis of corpus analysis (Biber et al. 1998).
Another direction concerns merging into a common database of scientific phraseologies of
several natural languages. Preliminary comparative study of scientific phraseology of Russian,
English, and Spanish languages shows an evident similarity of their word stereotypes. This fact can
be used for the systematical computer-aided teaching of foreign scientific phraseology.

References
Biber, D., Conrad S., and Reppen D. (1998) Corpus Linguistics. Investigating Language Structure
and Use. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Bolshakov, I. (1994) Multifunctional Thesaurus for Russian Word Processing. Proceedings of 4th
Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, Stuttgard, 13-15 October, 1994, p. 200-202.
Brusilovsky, P. (1996) Methods and Techniques of Adaptive Hypermedia. User Modeling and
User-Adapted Interaction, No 6 (2-3), p.87-129.
Bolshakova, E. (2000) Computer Assistance in Writing Technical and Scientific Texts. Proceedings
of 2nd International Symposium "Las Humanidades en la Educaci▋ Tecnica ante el Siglo XXI",
Mexico, 27-29 September, 2000, p. 59-63.
DICT (1973) Dictionary of Verb-Noun Combinations of the Common Scientific Speech. Nauka
Publ., Moscow (in Russian).
Fellbaum, C. (ed.) (1998) WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database. MIT Press, Cambridge.
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Mitrofanova, O. (1973) Language of Scientific and Technical Literature. Moscow University Press
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