Report on
EUROCALL Special Interest Group in NLP
Coleraine (2007)

 

 

At this year’s EUROCALL conference in Coleraine, the SIG for Natural Language Processing organized a symposium which was embedded in the regular paper sessions, in contrast to the pre-conference workshops the SIG had organized at earlier conferences. The symposium included a total of three papers. Detmar Meurers, in a paper with Luiz A. Amaral, argued in favour of a more flexible use of various NLP components in a complex learning environment. Whereas the typical pipeline architecture results in heavy loads for the computational system, a demand-driven use of NLP is flexible and allows for more task-specific processing. Gearóid Ó Néill then demonstrated how patterns found in a text corpus can reveal properties of a language. Regular inflection and, for Irish, aspects of initial mutation can be dealt with in this way. The resulting database can then be used for CALL exercises, generated from the corpus examples. The paper by Monica Ward considered the options when adapting a grammar and spell checker for young learners of Irish. As adapting an existing checker is considerably simpler than starting from scratch, adaptation to an audience with very little explicit knowledge of grammar terminology is more efficient, but requires some revision of feedback concepts. The symposium format worked well for this number of presentations and attracted a good audience.

 

During the conference, the SIG also held its annual general meeting, discussing possible activities for the next year and holding elections. After serving as chair and secretary since the founding of the SIG at the Eurocall conference in Dundee in 2000, Mat Schulze and Trude Heift decided to step down as co-chairs, but have promised to remain active in the SIG. Aliy Fowler, also a founding member, has volunteered to continue to maintain the SIG website: http://siglp.eurocall-languages.org/. Aliy has also recently updated the SIG’s logo, seen above. The SIG would like to express its sincere thanks to all of them for their invaluable contribution.

The SIG members present nominated and elected Hans Paulussen and Cornelia Tschichold onto the board to alternate as chair and secretary. Hans Paulussen is affiliated as senior researcher at the "ALT Research Center on CALL" (http://www.kuleuven-kortrijk.be/alt), at the University of Leuven, Campus Kortrijk (B). He is involved in a number of CALL projects mainly based on the authoring system IDIOMATIC, and projects involving parallel corpora for Dutch. He is also a member of the EuroCALL corpusCALL SIG and he maintains the Belgian Eurocall website. Cornelia Tschichold works in the department of Applied Linguistics at Swansea University (GB) where she teaches an MA-level module on CALL. Her research focuses on computational phraseology, grammar checking for non-native writers and vocabulary acquisition through CALL mainly for English as a foreign language.

 

The discussion during the meeting then centred around making the SIG more visible to the CALL community, with pre-conference workshops offering a good focus point. The SIG on Language Processing had organized such workshops at several Eurocall conferences: 2000 in Dundee, 2001 in Nijmegen, 2002 in Jyväskulä, and 2004 in Vienna. Hans Paulussen expressed an interest in organizing a workshop again at next year’s Eurocall conference in Székesfehérvár (Hungary). In order to make the workshop more accessible to non-specialists, a two-part format with a general introductory half-day session, perhaps with a practical element, and a more research-oriented second part for state-of-the-art contributions was discussed. The possibility of a workshop or some other contribution at next year’s WorldCALL conference in Japan was also considered. Decisions on both of these potential submissions will be taken at the appropriate time.

Finally, activities within the NLP community but outside Eurocall were mentioned. Some of these take place within the framework of CALICO in North America. The collaboration with the sister organization CALICO can be said to be excellent, thanks to a number of personal and institutional links.

Generally it was noted that there is considerable activity in the field of NLP in CALL over the coming months, with members of the SIG active in a number of conferences, i.e.

 

The main challenge for researchers working in the field of NLP in CALL is that of combining the most suitable approaches from computational linguistics and from the field of language learning into truly intelligent CALL, a target which is likely to remain interesting for some time to come.