Call for papers

Existing NLP tools and resources do not tend to find their way into the language learning classroom, despite their obvious potential uses in language learning. The reasons may be twofold. On the one hand, there is a lack of interested sponsors. On the other hand, there is a general lack of interest in the NLP community in CALL applications. While this situation arguably may have started to change for English, and a small number of other languages in the past ten years, it still holds true for the Nordic languages.

It seems that the few systems that have been developed for ICALL are either copyrighted and restricted by high licensing fees – and hence too expensive for universities and schools – or fall short of the required quality in linguistic or pedagogical functionality.

This situation calls for a change and the successful first workshop on NLP for CALL organized in connection with the Swedish Language Technology Conference 2012 in Lund, as well as the recent establishment of the NEALT SIG-ICALL, have showed that there is a need for a forum where these issues can be discussed.

In view of that, we welcome papers

that describe research directly aimed at ICALL,
that demonstrate actual or discuss potential use of existing NLP tools or resources for language learning,
that describe ongoing development of resources and tools with potential usage in ICALL, either directly in interactive applications, or indirectly in materials, application or curriculum development, e.g. collecting and annotating learner corpora; developing tools and algorithms for readability analysis, selecting optimal corpus examples, etc.
we are also interested in software demonstrations
We especially invite submissions describing work for Nordic languages.


Submission

Papers should conform to the main Nodalida stylesheet .

Submissions must be anonymous, i.e. not reveal author(s) on the title page or through self-references. Papers must be submitted digitally, in PDF, and uploaded through the on-line conference system EasyChair. Paper submissions that violate either of these requirements will be returned without review. The page limits for submissions are: up to fourteen pages for regular papers (eligible for presentations), and up to eight pages for short papers (eligible for posters/demos). For both submission types, these page limits do NOT include additional pages with bibliographic references. Please note that NoDaLiDa 2013 adopts a single-column, smaller page format, optimized for on-screen reading. In terms of actual word counts, the above page numbers correspond to approximately eight versus four pages, in a ‘classic’, two-column conference proceedings layout.

All submissions to the workshop must be uploaded electronically, following the above requirements. All submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be submitted for publication in the NEALT Proceeding Series (Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings).


Important dates:

March, 15: paper submission to EasyChair
April, 11: notification of acceptance
April, 25: camera-ready papers for publication. You are also required to submit the NEALT Transfer of Copyright Agreement with your final submission
May, 22: workshop date

Invited speaker

Dr. Cornelia Tschichold, Swansea University, chair of the EuroCALL NLP SIG


Program committee:

Toni Badia, UPF, Barcelona
Lars Borin, University of Gothenburg
Robert Eklund, Linköping University
Petter Karlström, Stockholm University
Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis, University of Gothenburg
Ola Knutsson, Stockholm University
Hrafn Loftsson, Reykjavik University
Montse Maritxalar, University of the Basque country
Detmar Meurers, University of Tübingen
Martí Quixal, The Universty of Texas at Austin
Mathias Schulze, University of Waterloo
Joel Tetreault, Nuance Communications
Cornelia Tschichold, Swansea University
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg

Workshop organizers

Elena Volodina, Språkbanken, Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg; elena dot volodina at svenska dot gu dot se (Organizing chair)
Lars Borin, Språkbanken, Department of Swedish, University of Gothenburg; lars dot borin at svenska dot gu dot se
Hrafn Loftsson, Reykjavik University hrafn at ru dot is