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@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@ling.osu.edu