About Lärka
Lärka - “LÄR språket via KorpusAnalys” - with its English equivalent “Lark” (Language Acquisition Reusing Korp) - is Språkbanken's platform designed for learning Swedish based on principles of Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Lärka development has started within the project “A System Architecture for Intelligent CALL” but lives its own life since 2013. It is a modular web-based exercise generator that reuses available annotated corpora and lexical resources. It is freely available to all interested user groups, including teachers and learners of Swedish as a second/foreign language.
Lärka develops as an ICALL application, and during the time a lot of research and resource development originated, dictated by Lärkas research agenda. You can find those projects here: https://spraakbanken.gu.se/eng/research/projects
There currently are three available versions of Lärka:
- LärkaLabb, the experimental (possibly unstable) version of Lärka with all the newest features.
- Lärka Archive, the old version of Lärka. Not maintained and mostly non-functional.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please, contact projektgruppen
Publications
2019
- David Alfter, Lars Borin, Ildikó Pilán, Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Elena Volodina. 2019. From Language Learning Platform to Infrastructure for Research on Language Learning. CLARIN-2018 post-conference volume. LiUP Press. [pdf]
2018
- David Alfter, Lars Borin, Ildikó Pilán, Therese Lindström Tiedemann and Elena Volodina. (2018) From Language Learning Platform to Infrastructure for Research on Language Learning. Clarin-2018.
- Alfter, David, & Volodina, Elena (2018) Towards Single Word Lexical Complexity Prediction. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 79-88) at NAACL-2018 [pdf]
2017
2016
- Elena Volodina, Ildikó Pilán, David Alfter. 2016. Classification of Swedish learner essays by CEFR levels. Proceedings of EuroCALL 2016, Cyprus.
- Ildikó Pilán, Elena Volodina and Torsten Zesch. 2016. Predicting proficiency levels in learner writings by transferring a linguistic complexity model from expert-written coursebooks. To appear in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2016, Osaka, Japan. [pdf]
- Ildikó Pilán, Elena Volodina and David Alfter. 2016. Coursebook texts as a helping hand for classifying linguistic complexity in language learners' writings. Proceedings of the workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), COLING 2016, Osaka, Japan.
- Ildikó Pilán, Elena Volodina. 2016. Classification of Language Proficiency Levels in Swedish Learners' Texts. Proceedings of SLTC 2016, Umeå, Sweden
- Therese Lindström Tiedemann, Elena Volodina, Håkan Jansson. Forthcoming. Lärka - ett verktyg att träna språkterminologi. LexicoNordica, Vol.23. [pdf]
2015
- Elena Volodina, Dijana Pijetlovic. 2015. Lark Trills for Language Drills: Text-to-speech technology for language learners. Proceedings of the 10th workshop on Building Educational Applications (BEA10), NAACL 2015, Denver, USA [pdf]
2014
- Elena Volodina, Therese Lindström Tiedemann. 2014. Evaluating students' metalinguistic knowledge with Lärka. Proceedings of the 6th Swedish Language Technology Conference. Uppsala, Sweden, 13-14 November 2014.[pdf]
- Ildikó Pilán, Elena Volodina. 2014. Reusing Swedish FrameNet for training semantic roles. Proceedings of LREC 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland. [pdf]
- Elena Volodina, Ildikó Pilán, Lars Borin and Therese Lindström Tiedemann. 2014. A flexible language learning platform based on language resources and web services. Proceedings of LREC 2014, Reykjavik, Iceland.[pdf]
2013
- Pijetlovic, D. & Volodina, E. (2013). Developing a Swedish spelling game on an ICALL platform. In: 20 Years of EUROCALL: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future. 2013 EUROCALL Conference, Évora, Portugal, Proceedings
- Pilán, I. Volodina, E. and Johansson, R. (2013). Automatic selection of suitable sentences for language learning exercises. In: 20 Years of EUROCALL: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future. 2013 EUROCALL Conference, Évora, Portugal, Proceedings
- Volodina, E., Pijetlovic, D., Pilán, I. and Johansson Kokkinakis, S. (2013). Towards a gold standard for Swedish CEFR-based ICALL. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP for Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Nodalida 2013, Oslo, Norway. [pdf]
- Volodina, E. & Johansson Kokkinakis, S. (2013). Compiling a corpus of CEFR-related texts. Proceedings of the Language Testing and CEFR conference, Antwerpen, Belgium, May 27-29, 2013. [pdf, p.248-259]
2012
- Elena Volodina, Lars Borin, Hrafn Loftsson, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Guðmundur Örn Leifsson. 2012. Waste not, want not: Towards a system architecture for ICALL based on NLP component re-use. Workshop on NLP in Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Proceedings of the SLTC 2012 workshop on NLP for CALL. Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 80: 47-58. [pdf]
- Elena Volodina, Richard Johansson, Sofie Johansson Kokkinakis. 2012. Semi-automatic selection of best corpus examples for Swedish: Initial algorithm evaluation. Workshop on NLP in Computer-Assisted Language Learning. Proceedings of the SLTC 2012 workshop on NLP for CALL. Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 80: 59–70. [pdf]
- Elena Volodina, Hrafn Loftsson, Birna Arnbjörnsdóttir, Lars Borin, and Guðmundur Örn Leifsson. 2012. Towards a system architecture for ICALL. In G. Biswas et al. (eds), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computers in Education. Singapore: Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education. [pdf]
- Elena Volodina and Lars Borin. 2012. Developing a freely available web-based exercise generator for Swedish. EuroCALL 2012 Proceedings, Gothenburg. [pdf]