Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development

This recording captures the virtual presentation of Monica Ward, Joining the blocks together: an NLP pipeline for CALL development. 

Abstract:

(I)CALL is inherently complex endeavour.  It is multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary in nature).  Natural Language Processing (NLP) involves using tools and techniques from Computational Linguistics (CL) and NLP in the language learning process. Often these tools and techniques are designed for tasks and purposes other than language learning and this makes their adaption and use in the CALL domain difficult. It can be even more challenging for Less Resourced Languages (LRLs) as they may be very few resources available to CALL researchers to adapt or incorporate into CALL resources.  This paper reports on how two existing NLP resources for Irish were used to develop a MALL app for Irish.  The app, Irish Word Bricks (IWB) was built using an existing CALL app - Word Bricks (Mozgovoy & Efimov, 2013).  Without this ‘joining the blocks together’ approach, the development of the app would certainly have taken longer, may not have been as efficient or effective and may not even have been accomplished at all.