We cordially invite you to participate in the upcoming workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning, to be held on the Faroe Islands, and online on May 22, 2023.

In order to participate, please register using the following link. Please note that remote participants are also required to register. The link for online participation will be sent out to registered participants.

https://www.nodalida2023.fo/registration

For more information on the workshop, see below, or visit the workshop website:

https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/research/themes/icall/nlp4call-workshop-series...

Best regards, David

== 12th NLP4CALL, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands==

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 error detection/correction and feedback generation.

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

==Invited speakers==

This year, we have the pleasure to announce two invited talks.

The first talk is given by Marije Michel from the University of Amsterdam.

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.

The second talk is given by Pierre Lison from the Norwegian Computing Center.

Privacy-enhancing NLP: a primer Text documents often contain personal data in some form – either related to the authors themselves or to some other individuals mentioned in the text. This raises privacy concerns, especially when those documents are to be published online or included as training data for NLP models. For Computer-Assisted Language Learning, this problem is compounded by the presence of various lexical and grammatical errors that may provide additional cues as to the identity of the author. Fortunately, privacy-enhancing techniques can be applied to provide at least some level of privacy, both for the author of the text (or linguistic production) and for the other individuals that may be referred in it. I’ll review in this talk some of those techniques, such as text sanitization, text rewriting, and privacy-preserving training. I’ll also describe in our own work on data-driven text sanitization based on explicit measures of privacy risks and will also present how such methods can be evaluated using our recently released Text Anonymization Benchmark (TAB).

==Important dates==

22 May 2023: workshop date

==Organizers==

David Alfter (1), Elena Volodina (2), Thomas François (3), Arne Jönsson (4), Evelina Rennes (4)

(1) Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities, Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (2) Språkbanken Text, Department of Swedish, Multilingualism, Language Technology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (3) CENTAL, Institute for Language and Communication, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium (4) Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden

==Contact==

For any questions, please contact David Alfter, david.alfter@gu.se

For further information, see the workshop website https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/research/themes/icall/nlp4call-workshop-series/nlp4call2023

Follow us on Twitter @NLP4CALL https://twitter.com/NLP4CALL/

13th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL 2024)

NLP4CALL, Rennes, France, 25 & 26 October 2024 https://nlp4call2024.sciencesconf.org/

We are happy to announce that the 2024 edition of NLP4CALL will be held in France at Université Rennes 2. As a result of the growing interest in the domain, the workshop series will be held over two days. Paper presentations, poster and demo sessions will alternate to offer a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in the field.

== Description of the workshop ==

The workshop series on Natural Language Processing 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 the 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 competencies 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/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 systems relying on AI trained for ICALL tasks. This includes, but not only, fine tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) and supervised-learning methods based on learning analytics. Issues related to data in SLA and learner corpus such as collection and feature extraction are also welcome.

== Invited speakers ==

This year we have the pleasure to welcome Helen Yannakoudakis (King's College London) and Kristopher Kyle (University of Oregon).

== Submission information ==

Authors are invited to submit long papers (8-12 pages) alternatively short or demo papers (4-7 pages), page count not including references. We will be using the NLP4CALL templates downloadable from the website for the workshop this year.

- LaTeX (https://spraakbanken.gu.se/sites/default/files/2023/NLP4CALL%20workshop%20te...) - Microsoft Word (https://spraakbanken.gu.se/sites/default/files/2023/nlp4call%20template.doc) - Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/nlp4call-workshop-template/qqqzqqyv...)

Final 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. Papers 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 submitted for publication in the NEALT Proceeding Series (Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings) and, additionally, double-published through the ACL anthology, following experiences from the previous NLP4CALL editions.

More details on the submission procedure will be communicated at a later stage.

== Important dates ==

- January 2024: First call for papers - March: Second call for papers - May: Final call for papers - 30 June: Paper submission deadline (long, short and demo) - 1 September: Notification of acceptance - 30 September: Camera-ready papers for publication - 25-26 October 2024: Workshop dates

== Organizers ==

Thomas Gaillat (1), Cyriel Mallart (1), Fabienne Moreau (1), Jen-Yu Li (1), David Alfter (2), Elena Volodina (3), Arne Jönsson (4)

1. Linguistique Ingénierie et Didactique des Langues (LIDILE), Université Rennes 2, France 2. Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH), University of Gothenburg, Sweden 3. Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 4. Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden

== Contact ==

nlp4call2024 [AT] sciencesconf.org