Appel: Automatic Analysis of Learner Language - CALICO-08 Workshop

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:21:56 -0400
From: Detmar Meurers <dm at ling.ohio-state.edu>
Message-ID: <20071017042156.GA24238 at ling.ohio-state.edu>
X-url: http://purl.org/net/calico-workshop


        First CFP for the CALICO'08 Pre-Conference Workshop on
     
               Automatic Analysis of Learner Language:
    Bridging Foreign Language Teaching Needs and NLP Possibilities

          March 18 or 19, 2008. University of San Francisco.

                Submission Deadline: November 19, 2007

Natural Language Processing has long been used to automatically
analyze language produced by language learners. While much interesting
research has been reported, it is difficult to determine the state of
the art for such automatic analyses of learner language. For example,
which error types and other language properties can be detected and
diagnosed automatically? How reliably is this done, absolutely or
compared to a human gold standard, for which kind of learner language?

These questions seem worth exploring given that for sustained progress
in the automatic analysis of learner language it arguably is essential
to discuss and compare the performance of different analysis methods,
preferably on identical, real-life data sets. As a prerequisite, it
also is important to come to an agreement on the error types and other
learner language properties that are useful and realistic to analyze.

These issues are not only relevant to NLP in Intelligent CALL but also
intersect in important ways with the research on learner corpora, the
annotation schemes developed for those, and the related Second
Language Acquisition research.

In this workshop, we want to bring together researchers working on the
analysis of learner language in the broad sense, including work on
annotation schemes for learner corpora and NLP techniques used to
detect learner errors and other learner language properties. We invite
abstracts addressing these general issues, including but not limited
to:

- Which properties of learner language are useful and relevant to
  obtain for Foreign Language Teaching and current Second Language
  Acquisition research?

- What annotation scheme or (error) taxonomy is appropriate for this
  and how do different annotation schemes compare?

- How reliably can errors and other properties of learner language
  be obtained automatically given the current state-of-the art in
  NLP?

- What is the impact of the specific properties of learner language
  on the (re)use of NLP technology? How does it impact performance
  and the potential use of such technology in foreign language
  teaching tools?

- Which annotated learner language corpora have been used or could
  be used to evaluate the performance of different approaches to
  analyzing learner language?

We invite submissions of anonymous two page abstracts in an email with
the abstract as a pdf attachment. Name, affiliation, and email address
should only be included in the text of the email, not in the abstract
in the pdf attachment.

Send submissions to: calico-workshop at ling.osu.edu
Submission Deadline: November 19

Workshop Website: http://purl.org/net/calico-workshop

The workshop is organized by the ICALL Special Interest Group of
CALICO, currently chaired by Detmar Meurers (Ohio State University)
and Anne Rimrott (Simon Fraser University).

Questions on the event? Contact us at calico-workshop at ling.osu.edu 


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