SwedishFromScratch: a mini-course for Ukranians

https://t.me/quizlet4swedish Sweden has received a new wave of refugees – Ukranians. They have sound school backgrounds, good university education, are ambitious and want to work. The Swedish government makes sure that Ukranian refugees get a temporary residence permit and a work permit in a fast application process, which at the moment takes about one month from the application date till decision. Given the above, it is very surprising that the Swedish authorities do not seem to take the most important step at …

God Jul from the Swedish Word Family

Lexical resources for Natural Language Processing (NLP),  Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and other applied disciplines differ in the choice of the lexical units they use as their main entry. Most widely-spread is use of a lemma, i.e. base form of a word, or a lemgram, i.e. base form + its part of speech (POS), cf François et al. (2016) and Kilgarriff et al. (2014). This is possibly due to the ease of creation of such resources using automatic annotation pipelines and the …

Swedish derivational morphology with CoDeRooMor

This blog is based on a joint work by Elena Volodina, Therese Lindström Tiedemann and Yousuf Ali Mohammed within the RJ-funded project L2 profiles. Three annotators have contributed to this work: Stellan Petersson (University of Gothenburg), Beatrice Silén (University of Helsinki ) and Maisa Lauriala (University of Helsinki). Do you know how many prefixes or suffixes the Swedish language has? Which ones? Different sources state different numbers, e.g Thorell (1984) lists approx. 90 derivational suffixes and about 50 derivatonal prefixes; Hultman (2003) …

Pseudonymization of learner essays as a way to meet GDPR requirements

This blog is based on the author’s (Elena Volodina’s) joint research with Yousuf (Samir) Ali Mohammed, Arild Matsson, Beáta Megyesi and Sandra Derbring Access to language data is an obvious prerequisite for research in digital humanities in general, and for the development of NLP-based tools in particular. However, accessible data becomes a challenging target where personal data is involved. This is very true of language learner data where tasks are often phrased so that they, directly or indirectly, elicit explicit personal information, …

Common Pitfalls in the Development of ICALL Applications

This blog is a piece of opinion where I sketch the process of developing NLP-based applications for second language learning and look at the process from the point of view of typical (mis)conceptions and challenges, as I have experienced them. Are we over-trusting the potential of NLP? Are teachers by definition reluctant to use NLP-based solutions in classrooms? How, if at all, can academic universities ensure sustainability of the developed applications? 1 Introduction Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Language Technology (LT) deal …