Let's play with proverbs? NLP tools and resources for iCALL applications around proverbs for PFL

Proverbs are an important form of cultural expression of a society and are related to various areas of knowledge and human experience (González Rey, 2002). While linguistic elements in widespread use, proverbs are very rich structures both from a cultural and from a linguistic point of view and can therefore contribute significantly to the teaching of languages, both native and foreign (Council of Europe, 2001). However, though there are extensive collections of Portuguese proverbs with tens of thousands of forms and its variants (Reis, in preparation), its automatic identification in texts is quite difficult, given its formal variation, both lexical and syntactic (Chacoto, 1994). Nevertheless, using real examples, where proverbs are used in a natural or spontaneous discourse context, is a more natural way to learn and teach the complex conditions and communicative situations that determine the use and meaning of these expressions. On the other hand, frequency indices associated with proverbs and its variants would allow one to select the most common expressions. These are precisely the most interesting forms from the point of view of their teaching/learning and could serve as a basis for the construction of educational games, particularly for learning Portuguese autonomously as a foreign language (PFL) assisted by computer. To make this possible, it is necessary, first of all, be able to recognize the occurrence of proverbs in the texts (Rassi et al. 2014), including the instances where these expressions are presented in a truncated or creatively modified form, for example, to better suit the communicative situation or to produce new and more expressive meanings. In this paper, we present an on-going project, which aims at automatic identification of proverbs in texts. In this interdisciplinary study, we combine natural language processing tools with questionnaires construction techniques for teaching purposes (Hoshino and Nakagawa 2005, Correia et al. 2010). This is illustrated here with different sets of formats that can be built based on the knowledge of the form and variation of proverbs, as well as their frequency in corpora.