Automatic Glossing Services for E-learning Cloud Environments

In language learning scenarios, the use of glossing technique has a positive effect on incidental vocabulary acquisition as a by-product of reading. However, the preparation of materials that include glosses can be a time consuming task for the teacher. Automatic glossing tools have gained interest to help reduce such efforts, and to provide a better experience using electronic documents. Most glossing tools are still developed following a monolithic approach for a specific system or language due to its complexity. As e-Learning platforms are moving from monolithic applications to service based platforms suitable for Cloud environments, the tools as well should be designed following Service-Oriented principles. This work focuses on the design of automatic glossing services suitable for Cloud environments. The development follows an original Virtual-Model-View-Controller design pattern for the creation of loosely coupled components. The services are assembled in a web-based tool called Wiki Gloss. Wikipedia Miner is used to extract the content to feed the glosses from Wikipedia, taking advantage of the vast content and diversity of topics that are already available, as well as languages. This approach offers a potential reusability of services not only in diverse applications that can take advantage of glossing, but also provides the content in different languages.