NoDaLiDa workshop, May 22, 2013, Oslo, Norway

Georg Sverdrups hus at Blindern, University of Oslo, Grupperom 1. Address: Moltke Moes vei 39.

12:00-13:00 Lunch: Frederikke. Address: Problemveien 11, 0313 Oslo, Norway

13.00-13.05 Introduction [pdf]

13.05-13.50 Cornelia Tschichold Challenges in ICALL (Invited talk)

13.50-14-30 Paper presentations 1

• 13.50-14.10 Lars Ahrenberg and Ljuba Tarvi Natural Language Processing for the Translation Class [pdf] [presentation]
• 14.10-14.30 Susanne Knoop and Sabrina Wilske WordGap - Automatic Generation of Gap-Filling Vocabulary Exercises for Mobile Learning [pdf]

14.30-15.00 Coffee break

15.00-16.30 Paper presentations 2

• 15.00-15.30 Lene Antonsen, Ryan Johnson, Trond Trosterud and Heli Uibo Generating modular grammar exercises with finite-state transducers [pdf]
• 15.30-16.00 Lene Antonsen Constraints in a free-input QA-drill [pdf]
• 16.00-16.30 Elena Volodina, Dijana Pijetlovic, Ildikó Pilán and Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis Towards a gold standard for Swedish CEFR-based ICALL [pdf] [presentation]

16.30-17.00 Discussion [pdf]

Type of paper and time allowance:

• Short papers are allowed 15+5 minutes, i.e. 15-minute long presentation followed by a 5-minute discussion
• Regular papers are allowed 25+5 minutes, i.e. 25-minute long presentation followed by a 5-minute discussion

The conference will be held in Georg Sverdrups hus at Blindern, University of Oslo. The workshop will take place in Group room 1 (Grupperom 1).

The lunch will be served in Frederikke starting at 12.00.

Elena is the contact person. Her telephone number is: +46-31-625-6535. Don't hesitate to call her if you have any questions.

Don't forget, that you are required to submit to us the Copyright Agreement with your final submission. Please download the form from the provided URL: http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/085/NODALIDA_2013.pdf, fill it in, sign (by all the authors; or by the corresponding author if the others do not object), scan it and attach to the mail.

You need to register to attend.

• Regular registration (until April 22, 2013)
• Late registration (until May 17, 2013)

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.

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).

• 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 (signed at least by the corrseponding author and scanned) with your final submission.
  The agreement can be downloaded here: <http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/085/NODALIDA_2013.pdf>
• May, 22: workshop date

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

• 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

• 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

• The 8th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (Atlanta, GA, USA; June 13 or 14, 2013)
• ICALL in the Digital Age: Leveraging Natural Language Processing in an Increasingly Connected Learning Environment (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA; May 22, 2013)
• Native Language Identification Shared Task (Atlanta, USA; June 13 or 14, 2013)
• CoNLL Shared Task on Grammatical Error Correction (Sofia, Bulgaria; August 08-09, 2013)
• Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) (Grenoble, France; August 30-01)

For all inquiries, please email Elena Volodina <elena dot volodina at svenska dot gu dot se>