2nd workshop on NLP for computer-assisted language learning

NoDaLiDa workshop, May 22, 2013, Oslo, Norway

Workshop website:
http://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/forskning/ICALL/2ndNLP4CALL


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

For all inquiries, please email Elena Volodina (elena dot volodina at
svenska dot gu dot se)