AALL-09

Pre-Conference Workshop at CALICO 2009 on

Automatic Analysis of Learner Language (AALL’09):
From a better understanding of annotation needs to the development and standardization of annotation schemes

March 10 and 11, 2009. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

In this workshop, we want to bring together researchers working on the analysis of learner language in the broad sense, including work on annotation schemes for learner corpora and NLP techniques used to detect learner errors and other learner language properties. We invite abstracts addressing these general issues, including but not limited to:

  • Which properties of learner language are useful and relevant to obtain for Foreign Language Teaching and current Second Language Acquisition research?
  • What annotation scheme or (error) taxonomy is appropriate for this and how do different annotation schemes compare?
  • How reliably can errors and other properties of learner language be obtained automatically given the current state-of-the art in NLP?
  • What is the impact of the specific properties of learner language on the (re)use of NLP technology? How does it impact performance and the potential use of such technology in foreign language teaching tools?
  • Which annotated learner language corpora have been used or could be used to evaluate the performance of different approaches to analyzing learner language?

The program of AALL’09 is available here and the abstracts of the accepted papers are linked from that page.

The workshop was organized by the ICALL Special Interest Group of CALICO, chaired by Xiaofei Lu (Pennsylvania State University) and Detmar Meurers (Uniersität Tübingen). Questions? Please email us at calico-workshop@ling.osu.edu

The workshop followed up on the pre-conference workshop on the Automatic Analysis of Learner Language held at CALICO 2008 (click 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).