11th NLP4CALL workshop

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, December 9, 2022

NEW Program change: Invited talk 2 (Marije Michel) is replaced by a talk by Elena Volodina
The proceedings are online: NLP4CALL proceedings 2022
The program is online!
~Registration is open!~
~Notification of acceptance: November 8, 2022~
~Deadline extension: New deadline: October 12, 2022 UTC+1~

Quick links

COVID information

Concerning COVID-related issues, we follow the official recommendations. For up-to-date information, please see https://www.info-coronavirus.be/en/

Venue

This year's NLP4CALL workshop will be organized as a hybrid event in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium on December 9, 2022, as well as online.

For online participation, a link to the Zoom room will be shared with registered participants in due time.

For on-site participation, the workshop will be held in Maison des Langues, room A118. The address is: Voie du Roman Pays 3A, 1348 Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgien.

How to get to Louvain-la-Neuve

Please note that there are two cities with similar names, Leuven (Louvain) and Louvain-la-Neuve. You need to go to Louvain-la-Neuve.
Please also note that Ottignies is a different city than Louvain-la-Neuve, and they have separate train stations. If coming by train, you will most probably pass through Ottignies, and you most probably will have to change trains there to get to Louvain-la-Neuve (although there are some direct connections).

Airport: From Brussels Zaventem, there are train directly leaving from the airport. You may need to change in Ottignies (see above).
Train: From Brussels, there are trains to Ottignies, where you must change trains to continue to Louvain-la-Neuve. There are some direct connections to Louvain-la-Neuve as well.
Car: When arriving by car, please note that traffic is routed underneath the city. There are several parkings located underneath the city, all of which are suitable.

Staying in Louvain-la-Neuve

There are two hotels in Louvain-la-Neuve, the Martin's and the Ibis Styles. The Martins is located within close distance of the venue. There is also a cheaper alternative, the Gîte Mozaïk, although their online booking system is currently offline and you will have to inquire via email.

Registration

To register, please use this form: Registration to NLP4CALL

If you are unable or unwilling to fill this form, please send the following information to david.alfter@uclouvain.be
Full name
Email
Affiliation
Will you attend the workshop in person: yes/no
Dietary restrictions

Program

Please note that all time indications are CET/UTC+1


09:00 - 09:05		Opening session
09:05 - 09:55		Invited talk 1 The Evolution of Automatic Grammatical Error Correction _Christopher Bryant_ Chair: Elena Volodina
		Session 1
		Chair: David Alfter
09:55 - 10:15		Swedish MuClaGED: A new dataset for Grammatical Error Detection in Swedish _Judit Casademont Moner and Elena Volodina_
10:15 - 10:30		Coffee break
		Session 2
		Chair: David Alfter
10:30 - 10:50		Generating and authoring high-variability exercises from authentic texts _Tanja Heck and Detmar Meurers_
10:50 - 11:10		The instructional effectiveness of automatically generated exercises for learning French grammatical gender: preliminary results _Stephen Bodnar_
11:10 - 11:25		A Transformer for SAG: What Does it Grade? _Nico Willms and Ulrike Pado_
11:25 - 11:40		Coffee break
		Session 3
		Chair: Rodrigo Wilkens
11:40 - 12:00		Towards a Verb Profile: distribution of verbal tenses in FFL textbooks and in learner productions _Nami Yamaguchi, David Alfter, Kaori Sugiyama and Thomas François_
12:00 - 12:15		Language learning analytics: designing and testing new functional complexity measures in L2 writing _Thomas Gaillat_
12:15 - 12:30		Metadata Formats for Learner Corpora: Case Study and Discussion _Herbert Lange_
12:30 - 14:00		Lunch
14:00 - 14:50		~Invited talk 2 TELL: Tasks Engaging Language Learners _Marije Michel_~ ICALL research: agenda vs reality [Slides] [Article, p.145-151] _Elena Volodina_ Chair: Thomas François
		Session 4
		Chair: David Alfter
14:50 - 15:10		Exploring Linguistic Acceptability in Swedish Learners’ Language _Julia Klezl, Yousuf Ali Mohammed and Elena Volodiina_
15:10 - 15:25		Coffee break
		Session 5
		Chair: Frederik Cornillie
15:25 - 15:45		Bringing Automatic Scoring into the Classroom - Measuring the Impact of Automated Analytic Feedback on Student Writing Performance _Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Lucas Liebenow, Thorben Jansen, Stefan Keller, Jennifer Meyer, Torsten Zesch and Johanna Fleckenstein_
15:45 - 16:05		The Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus version 2: more lessons, new annotation, automatic detection of sequence shifts _Andrew Caines, Helen Yannakoudakis, Helen Allen, Pascual Pérez-Paredes, Bill Byrne and Paula Buttery_
16:05 - 16:20		Comparing Native and Learner Englishes Using a Large Pre-trained Language Model _Tatsuya Aoyama_
16:20 - 16:40		Coffee break
		Session 6
		Chair: Elena Volodina
16:40 - 17:00		Interactive word sense disambiguation in foreign language learning _Jasper Degraeuwe and Patrick Goethals_
17:00 - 17:20		Evaluating Automatic Spelling Correction Tools on German Primary School Children's Misspellings _Ronja Laarman-Quante, Lisa Prepens and Torsten Zesch_
17:20 - 17:30		Closing session

Invited speakers

This year we have the pleasure to welcome two invited speakers:

Christopher Bryant

Christopher Bryant is a Principal Applied Research Scientist at the AI-powered translation and language tool service Reverso, and a Research Associate in the Institute for Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) at the University of Cambridge. His main research interests include automatic grammatical error detection and correction (GED/GEC), automatic corpus annotation, and the robust evaluation of grammatical error correction systems, along with computer-aided language learning in general. He completed his PhD on “Automatic annotation for grammatical error correction” in 2019 and is the lead developer of the associated ERRor ANnotation Toolkit (ERRANT) which is widely used to benchmark progress in the field. He led the most recent shared task on GEC in 2019 (BEA-2019) and currently researches artificial error generation for GEC and develops the Ginger grammar checker at Reverso.

The Evolution of Automatic Grammatical Error Correction
Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is the task of automatically detecting and correcting all kinds of errors in text. The field has grown significantly in the past decade and now enjoys increased visibility in products such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Grammarly. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the field and introduce the datasets, approaches, and evaluation methods that are commonly used to build GEC systems. I will conclude with recent trends and remaining challenges for future work.

Marije Michel

Marije Michel (PhD Applied Linguistics, University of Amsterdam) is chair of Language Learning at Groningen University in the Netherlands. Her research and teaching focus on second language acquisition and processing with specific attention to task-based language pedagogy, digitally-mediated interaction and writing in a second language.

TELL: Tasks Engaging Language Learners
Taking a task-based approach on language teaching, learning and assessment (TBLT), the basic unit of second language (L2) instruction is a task. Tasks are (pedagogic) activities that adhere to specific criteria (e.g., there needs to be a communicative gap, Skehan, 1998) in order to ensure that learners engage in meaningful language use during task performance. In the long run, only tasks engaging students in authentic language use may lead to L2 processes that have the potential to support L2 acquisition. In this presentation, I will review the most important principles of designing engaging learning tasks, highlight examples of practice-induced L2 research using digital tools, and will showcase some of my own work on task design for L2 learning during digitally mediated communication and L2 writing. In doing so, I will discuss the NLP measures we use to evaluate task-based performance, formulating TBLT desiderata for the future of NLP4CALL.

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 the integration of 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, insights from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, on the one hand, and promote development of “Computational SLA” through setting up Second Language research infrastructure(s), on the other.

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, 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 invites therefore 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 are 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 demonstrate actual or discuss the potential use of existing Language and Speech Technologies or resources for language learning;
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.

This year a special focus is given to work done on second language vocabulary and grammar profiling, as well as the use of crowdsourcing for creating, collecting and curating data in NLP projects.

We encourage paper presentations and software demonstrations describing the above-mentioned themes primarily, but not exclusively, for the Nordic languages.

Submission information

We will be using the NLP4CALL templates for the workshop this year.

Submissions that do not adhere to the author guidelines will be rejected without review.

Authors are invited to submit long papers (8-12 pages) alternatively short or demo papers (4-7 pages), page count not including references. Please indicate one relevant paper type at submission time. Only pdf files will be accepted. Submissions will be managed through the electronic conference management system EasyChair. Final camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be given an additional page to address reviewer comments.

Make a submission

Papers should describe original unpublished work or work-in-progress. Every paper will be reviewed by at least 2 members of the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author's identity, e.g., "We previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...", should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as "Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) ...". Submissions will be judged on appropriateness, clarity, originality/innovativeness, correctness/soundness, meaningful comparison, significance and impact of ideas or results.

All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be submitted for publication in the NEALT Proceeding Series (Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings) and, additionally, double-published through ACL anthology, following experiences from previous workshops, e.g. the 10th NLP4CALL.

Important dates


17 June 2022	First call for papers
17 August 2022	Second call for papers
9 September 2022	Third call for papers
30 September 2022	Final call for papers
~7 October 2022~12 October UTC+1	Paper submission deadline (short, long and demo)
~4 November 2022~ 8 November 2022	Notification of acceptance
25 November 2022	Camera-ready papers for publication
9 December 2022	Workshop date

Program committee (preliminary)

David Alfter, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium and University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Serge Bibauw, Universidad Central del Ecuador, Ecuador
Claudia Borg, University of Malta, Malta
António Branco, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Andrew Caines, University of Cambridge, UK
Xiaobin Chen, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Frederik Cornillie, University of Leuven, Belgium
Kordula de Kuthy, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Piet Desmet, University of Leuven, Belgium
Thomas François, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Johannes Graën, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Andrea Horbach, FernUniversität Hagen, Germany
Arne Jönsson, Linköping University, Sweden
Ronja Laarmann-Quante, FernUniversität Hagen, Germany
Herbert Lange, University of Hamburg, Germany
Peter Ljunglöf, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Chalmers Institute of Technology, Sweden
Margot Mieskes, University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, Germany
Lionel Nicolas, EURAC research, Italy
Ulrike Pado, Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, Germany
Magali Paquot, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Evelina Rennes, Linköping University, Sweden
Egon Stemle, EURAC research, Italy
Francis M. Tyers, Indiana University Bloomington, US
Sowmya Vajjala, National Research Council, Canada
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Zarah Weiss, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Rodrigo Wilkens, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Torsten Zesch, FernUniversität Hagen, Germany
Ramon Ziai, Universität Tübingen, Germany
Robert Östling, Stockholm University, Sweden

Workshop organizers

David Alfter, CENTAL, Institute for Language and Communication, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium and Språkbanken Text, Department of Swedish, multilingualism, language technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; david dot alfter at uclouvain dot be (Organizing chair)
Elena Volodina, Språkbanken Text, Department of Swedish, multilingualism, language technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; elena dot volodina at svenska dot gu dot se
Thomas François, CENTAL, Institute for Language and Communication, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Piet Desmet, Itec, Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven & imec, Belgium
Frederik Cornillie, Itec, Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven & imec, Belgium
Arne Jönsson, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden
Evelina Rennes, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden

This year's workshop is jointly financed by itec and the CENTAL. The workshop series has been previously financed by the Centre for Language Technology (University of Gothenburg), the SweLL project (University of Gothenburg) and the Swedish Research Council's conference grant. The workshop has also received funding from Språkbanken-Text and the L2 profiling project.

For the past ten years we successfully co-located the NLP4CALL with the two major Language Technology events in Scandinavia, SLTC and NoDaLiDa, thus making this workshop an annual event. We intend to continue this tradition. Through this workshop, we intend to profile ICALL research in Nordic countries and to provide a dissemination venue for researchers active in this area.

ICALL-relevant mailing lists

There is one mailing list that spreads ICALL-relevant information run by BEA-workshop organizers (bea.nlp.workshop@gmail.com). We encourage you to join them to be updated of the events, publications and discussions in the area

To join BEA-list, contact Andrea Horbach (andrea.horbach@uni-due.de). BEA-mailing list spreads information in a digest form approx 4 times a year.

For NLP4CALL inquiries, please email David Alfter (david dot alfter at uclouvain dot be)