14th NLP4CALL

A workshop co-located with NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT in Tallin, Estonia on March 5th, 2025.

More information to come in the following days!

Venue

This year's NLP4CALL workshop will be organized as a hybrid event. The workshop will physically take place in Tallin, Estonia on March 5th, 2025 and online on Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent out to registered participants.

The physical location will be Hestia Hotel Europa (Address: Paadi 5, Tallinn, Estonia) [View on Google Maps]. For on-site participation, the links and maps will be provided on the main conference website: venue.

Registration

Registration is done via the NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT registration website, to be made available December.

Shared Task

This year we are offering the MultiGEC shared task on multilingual grammatical error correction for L2 language learners. There are 12 target languages covered, namely Czech, English, Estonian, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Russian, Slovene, Swedish, and Ukrainian. This shared task is organized by the Computational SLA working group.

For more information, please see the Shared Task website: https://github.com/spraakbanken/multigec-2025/.

Invited Speakers

This year we have the pleasure to announce two invited speakers: - Andrew Caines from Cambridge University, United Kingdom. The name of the talk will be announced soon. - Peter Uhrig from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Germany. The name of his talk is AI-assisted Constructicography – Opportunities and Challenges.

Description of the Workshop

The workshop series on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL) is a meeting place for researchers working on integrating Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies in CALL systems and exploring the theoretical and methodological issues arising in this connection. The latter includes, among others, the integration of insights from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, and the promotion of “Computational SLA” through setting up Second Language research infrastructures.

The intersection of Natural Language Processing (or Language Technology / Computational Linguistics) and Speech Technology with Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) brings “understanding” of language to CALL tools, thus making CALL intelligent. This fact has given the name for this area of research — Intelligent CALL, or short, ICALL. As the definition suggests, apart from having excellent knowledge of Natural Language Processing and/or Speech Technology, ICALL researchers need good insights into second language acquisition theories and practices, as well as knowledge of second language pedagogy and didactics. This workshop therefore invites a wide range of ICALL-relevant research, including studies where NLP-enriched tools are used for testing SLA and pedagogical theories, and vice versa, where SLA theories, pedagogical practices or empirical data and modeled in ICALL tools. The NLP4CALL workshop series is aimed at bringing together competences from these areas for sharing experiences and brainstorming around the future of the field.

We welcome papers:

that describe research directly aimed at ICALL
that describe the 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. learning material generation, assessment of learner texts and responses, individualized learning solutions, provision of feedback
that discuss challenges and/or research agenda for ICALL
that describe empirical studies on language learner data
that explore the use of LLMs and Generative AI to develop ICALL tools

In this edition of the workshop a special focus is given to

grammatical error correction (see a special track for MultiGEC shared task and a call for participation)
the use of pedagogically oriented constructicographic resources (constructicons), with an emphasis on their practical application in ICALL. By constructicographic resources, we refer to resources that describe various types of constructions associated with specific meanings or functions, ranging from fully schematic and semi-schematic constructions (e.g., those with both fixed and variable elements) to specific lexical expressions.

We particularly encourage software demonstrations showcasing the potential use of existing Language and Speech Technologies or resources in ICALL applications for Nordic and Finno-Ugric languages.

Submission Information

We accept both short and long papers, as well as demo papers. The submissions must describe original and unpublished work.

Paper length:

Short and demo papers must be between 4 and 7 pages.
Long papers must be between 8 and 12 pages.
References are not included in the page count and the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be given an additional page to address reviewer comments.

Papers should describe original unpublished work or work-in-progress and will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a double-blind fashion. All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be published both in the NEALT Proceeding Series and through the ACL anthology.

The submission will be through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=nlp4call2025

The links to the Latex and Word templates can be found here: https://spraakbanken.gu.se/forskning/teman/icall/nlp4call-workshop-series/nlp4call2023#submission

Important Dates

Submission date: December 16th, 2024
Acceptance notification: January 20th, 2025
Workshop date: March 5th, 2025

Workshop Organizers

Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
David Alfter, Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH), University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Elena Volodina, Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Jelena Kallas, Institute of the Estonian Language, Estonia

Sponsor information

This workshop is supported jointly by:

The project Expanding the scope of a multi-purpose lexicographic resource to grammar and L2 competence, funded by the Estonian Research Council grant (PRG 1978).
The project Grandma Karl is 27 years old: Automatic pseudonymization of research data with the Swedish Research Council grant with funding number 2022-02311.