ICALL

SIG ICALL of CALICO (https://calico.uoregon.edu/sigs/icall/welcome/), the Special Interest Group in Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning

Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) is an interdisciplinary research field integrating insights from computational linguistics and artificial intelligence into computer-aided language learning. Such integration is needed for CALL systems to be able to analyze language automatically, to make them aware of language as such. This makes it possible to provide individualized feedback to learners working on exercises, to (semi-)automatically prepare or enhance texts for learners, and to automatically create and use detailed learner models.

The ICALL SIG of CALICO is an open forum of discussion for research and development in this area. As such it regularly organizes workshops on related topics and supports on-line discussion through its nlpcall@watarts.uwaterloo.ca email list; to subscribe, send email to Mathias Schulze at mschulze@watarts.uwaterloo.ca. The SIG holds a yearly meeting at the CALICO Conference, where it also elects its officers. The current chairs are Luiz Amaral and Peter Wood. The previous co-chairs of the SIG are Detmar Meurers, Xiaofei Lu, Anne Rimrott, Trude Heift and Mathias Schulze. The ICALL SIG of CALICO closely collaborates with the NLPCALL SIG of EUROCALL, which you can find at http://siglp.eurocall-languages.org.

The ICALL SIG organized a pre-conference workshop at CALICO 09 on the Automatic Analysis of Learner Language (AALL’09): From a better understanding of annotation needs to the development and standardization of annotation schemes, for which more information is available here.

The workshop followed up on the ICALL SIG’s pre-conference workshop at CALICO 08 on Automatic Analysis of Learner Language: Bridging Foreign Language Teaching Needs and NLP Possibilities for which the program, abstracts, and other information can be found here.

Selected papers from this workshop appeared in a special issue of the CALICO journal edited by Detmar Meurers which appeared as Vol 26, No.3 (May 2009).

Current leadership:

Chair: Serge Bibauw (serge.bibauw@kuleuven.be)

Associate Chair: Mahmoud Amer (mamer@wcupa.edu)