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Key Word in Context Finder

Key Word in Context Finder. A Concordance Tool for Online Learning and Research William H. Fletcher United States Naval Academy Paper presented at the annual meeting of EuroCALL, University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland, 31 August – 2 September 2000.

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Key Word in Context Finder

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  1. Key Word in Context Finder A Concordance Tool for Online Learning and Research William H. Fletcher United States Naval Academy Paper presented at the annual meeting of EuroCALL, University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland, 31 August – 2 September 2000.

  2. Info, info everywhere… I’ve got no time to think!

  3. Information Overload Increasing information access has led to information excess leaving us no time to process the information we do access.

  4. InfoAge Paradox The more information we have, the less we seem to be able to do with it.

  5. InfoAge Writer’s Block Any intellectual property yet, honey?

  6. Is the InfoAge leading us toward disaster?

  7. What does the future hold for our students? Actually I’m hoping that what I grow up to be hasn’t been invented yet.

  8. What can we do to prepare our students for the future?

  9. The Purpose of an Education To learn to distinguish Sense from Nonsense The details change, but the principles remain the same.

  10. Help turn the Information Age into theKnowledge Age • Raw Bits into Information • Information into Knowledge

  11. The FAIRness Principle • Find information • Assess its relevance, significance, and reliability • Integrate it into one’s knowledge base • Retrieve it efficiently

  12. Isn’t the Web wonderful? The Dream… With so much information at their fingertips, students will attain new levels of insight and synthesis The Reality… Random Cut & Paste (with attribution?) replaces original research and creativity

  13. Isn’t the Web wonderful? The Dream… Instant access to authentic materials from around the globe The Reality… World Wide Wait + World Wide Haystack = World Wide Frustration

  14. Isn’t the Web wonderful? The Dream… With so many powerful Search Engines it should be easy to find appropriate materials online The Reality… Search Engines are designed to optimize the number, not the relevance of hits

  15. KWiCFinder – Purpose A research tool to… • help formulate and focus queries • automatically retrieve and excerpt documents matching the search criteria A search produces a Key Word in Context concordance of the documents analyzed

  16. KWiCFinder – Genesis KWiCFinder was motivated by… • observation of and discussions with students and colleagues conducting online searches • my own frustration with the inordinate effort required to find suitable content for instructional materials and research

  17. KWiCFinder – AltaVista KWiCFinder uses the AltaVista search engine • Largest corpus indexed – claims 340 MDocs • Useful features for highly-specific searches • World-wide coverage; Specify language • Distinguishes case and special characters • Best documentation of how Boolean and other criteria are implemented • No stopwords excluded from index

  18. KWiCFinder Enhancements Offers significant enhancements to AltaVista for foreign languages: • Intuitive approach to special char input • Tamecards greatly increase query specificity with limited user overhead • point-and-click inclusion of countries, date ranges, domains etc. for search criteria not included in report

  19. More KWiCFinder Enhancements • AltaVista supports NEAR, i.e. two search terms must occur within 10 words of each other • KWiCFinder adds BEFORE and AFTER, and allows the user to specify up to how many words apart

  20. KWiCFinder Query Screen

  21. KWiCFinder Inclusion Screen

  22. KWiCFinder Exclusion Screen

  23. KWiCFinder Option Screen

  24. KWiCFinder – “Sic” Option AltaVista Wildcards – Implicit • Any plain char matches all corresponding chars with diacritics • Any lower-case chars matches corresponding UPPER-CASE as well - continuo always matches continuo, continúo, continuó • fahrt always matches fahrt, Fahrt, fährt KWiCFinder offers a “sic” option to block these built-in wildcards when desired

  25. KWiCFinder – Wildcards AltaVista Wildcards – Explicit * (asterisk) matches 0-5 chars; must be preceded by 3 chars minimum KWiCFinder adds % (percent) matches 0-1 chars ? matches 1 char

  26. KWiCFinder Additional Wildcards KWiCFinder Wildcards – Implicit • Apostrophe ’ and hyphen - match forms with these marks, space, or no space - (ich) hab’s matches hab’s and habs - on-line matches on-line, on line, online • co-operate matches co-operate, cooperate, coöperate

  27. KWiCFinder Tamecards • Wildcards return any sequence of n chars • Tamecards match only those combinations of chars specified by the user.

  28. KWiCFinder Tamecards – Plain

  29. KWiCFinder Tamecards – Indexed

  30. KWiCFinder – Latest Innovations XML report format provides for… • Changing report language or format without new search • Annotating, classifying, and deleting citations or documents • Merging search reports or extracting subsets of them

  31. KWiCFinder – Current Status • Download for free at http://miniappolis.com/KWiCFinder/ • Auto-update keeps up with changes in AV search engine and KF program • Caveats and Limitations • still beta software, subject to bugs and changes • observe system requirements (Win 9x, technical specs, IE 5+; NT/2000??) • “emerging” documentation

  32. The Web is My Corpus,I Shall Not Want… • I shall not want for material • Numerous documents can be found on-line in almost any language • I shall not want for challenges • Formulate a query that yields optimally useful results • Determine which documents are reliable and representive in form and content

  33. KWiCFinder as a Teaching and Learning Tool • Micro / Form Level • Lexical – word use, vocabulary discovery and verification, collocates, lexical functions • Grammatical – examples of forms and structures in context • Macro / Content Level • Assess usefulness (relevance, accessibility) of many documents quickly and efficiently

  34. Preparing Learners To Use KWiCFinder • Pre-Search Organizer • What words or phrases do you need to see in context? Which are essential? Which are alternatives? • What other factors (country, date, other terms) might help narrow your search? • Post-Search Evaluation • Documents chosen – Why? Contribution? • Documents rejected – Why?

  35. Limitations KWiCFinder is only as good as the Search Engine it uses. Spurious hits result because… • AV is not always current due to “link rot” and changed pages • Documents returned by a general search on AV may not meet the more-specific criteria submitted to KWiCFinder

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