![](bg9.png)
any facet (and thus prism), relying on their own pre-
processing or should they all be linked to a facet the
way the views in figure 7 are to F
repE
t
? Should the
ones that are linked to specific facets solely be linked
to them by their common pre-processing or should
they before all be linked to a prism ?
6 CONCLUSIONS
We introduced this model as a second version of a pre-
vious work (Loiseau et al., 2008). This new version is
not only justified by a concerned to make it clearer:
despite being similar in philosophy, it comes after
the theorization of the notion of Pedagogical Context.
Even though present in the first version of the model,
PC was roughly defined. The work on the notion has
allowed us to build on sounder basis the notions of
facet and prism, which have be subject to semanti-
cal alteration. The prism was in the first version a
global module of the system handling all processes
and which is now explicitly linked to a facet, thus un-
derlying the tight link between the two of them.
Despite its simplicity, prism P
wrdCount
exemplifies
this relation, the kind of approximation inherent to the
task at hand and the usefulness of NLP in the imple-
mentation of such a system. Depending on the capac-
ities of the pre-processing
13
the definition of the facet
can be altered (or the other way around). The word
count can be based on a list of separators between
which lie the words to be counted. But in this case the
French “chou-fleur” could be two words, while it ac-
tually designate a precise object (cauliflower)
14
. The
decision of which kind of treatment to use can come
from a didactic question: one wants to evaluate the
length of the text, in order to provide an idea of size
of the text, considering compounds as separate words
might not be a problem. But one might consider that
the word count should be as consistent with the lin-
guistic definition of word as possible. But what in-
terest teachers could actually be to consider as words
only non function words in order to get a better grasp
at the quantity of vocabulary necessary to understand
the text. On the other hand the choice of what the
facet actually means might come from purely practi-
cal reasons: the available word count function works
with no dictionary whatsoever and cannot distinguish
function words from others or even identify a com-
13
In this case the pre-processing actually could evaluate
the property, due to its independence from the PC.
14
’-’ should be a separator in French since it is added
when the verb and subject are inverted to form a question:
Dort-elle ? Oui, elle dort comme une masse. (Is she sleep-
ing? Yes she is sleeping like a log)
pound. In both, case the link between the concept be-
hind the facet and the prism should remain unaltered,
might it mean modifying the prism, the facet or both...
The meaning of view has also changed (the view
of this version of the model corresponds more or less
to the visualization of the former) leading to alter-
ation of the implementation. The questions raised in
the previous section by this extension to the evalua-
tion task are among the various implementation ques-
tions at hand. We are implementing a prototype of
this version of the model. It will undoubtedly raise
more questions, such as the definition of a framework
for prisms in order to make their integration and de-
velopment easier.
Such a definition could also lead us to consider the
problem of the system’s adaptation to its users up to
allowing them to create their own prisms and facets.
Indeed we have seen with F
AN
that a new prism could
with didactic added value could be implemented with
very little treatment (threshold values definition) be-
yond the grouping of two existing prisms. Careful
analysis and specification of implementation conse-
quences of the properties of prisms might constitute a
viable path toward end-user programming functional-
ities (Nardi, 1993) through the creation of compound
prisms.
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FACET AND PRISM BASED MODEL FOR PEDAGOGICAL INDEXATION OF TEXTS FOR LANGUAGE
LEARNING - The Consequences of the Notion of Pedagogical Context
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