From school classrooms to CLARIN:EL

To celebrate World Teachers' Day (5 October), this article is dedicated to the resources which are hosted in the CLARIN:EL Infrastructure and constitute members of the Educational Textbooks Resource Family.

Vasilis Vasileiadis, talks about the CGL Modern Greek Texts Corpora: corpus of Educational Textbooks, one of the resources which were created during his tenure as a researcher at the Department of Language and Literature of the Centre for the Greek Language (CGL) and as a Scientific Responsible of the CGL Institutional Repository in CLARIN:EL:

The corpus of Educational Textbooks (textbooks published by the Greek Ministry of Education) comprises around 2.000.000 words and includes extensive excerpts from high school textbooks in force during the period 2000-2005. This material does not include course manuals, where continuous discourse does not abound or is limited to literary commentary only. An effort has also been made to make the corpus as representative as possible, i.e. to gather as many textbooks as possible, mainly to capture the specific vocabularies of various sciences. In addition, emphasis was given to textbooks of technical and 'science' courses, which have hitherto been curiously neglected or underestimated as language material.

The corpus is available via a web interface, where the user can search both for words by typing them as they are in the search box and for lemmas with the nominative singular form of a noun, for example. The results can be further restricted by selecting the books where the user wants to search for (e.g. Religious Studies 1st grade, Physics 2nd grade, etc.) and/or by specifying the textual type (description, narration, explanation, process analysis, instructions, argumentation) of the educational discourse.

Access to this resource is freely available for research purposes through CLARIN:EL under a CC-BY-NC-ND License of Use (Attribution, Non-Commercial use, No Derivatives).