I spent last week attending the CALICO symposium. The attendees were an interesting mix of language teachers, managers of language learning computer labs at Universities, linguists, and a few people interested in Computer Science/Linguist hybrid folk like me, interested in the intersection of Natural Language Processing and AI-driven computer pedagogy.
The signal-to-noise ratio would have been horrendously low, were it not for the handy “NLP in CALL” preconference workshop–it was easy to see early on who had research similar to mine.
The biggest surprise for me at the workshop was that I recognized nearly no one there. Now, I’m not an academic hermit by any means, but one of the biggest bits of take-home-knowledge for me from this conference was not technical in nature, but more meta: AI in CALL is a horribly fragmented field. Vis:
- On one hand you have the ASR-heavy research groups that focus on modeling of learner pronunciation. Project LISTEN, SRI’s Eduspeak, John Morgan @ USMA. Conferences like EuroSpeech
- On another hand, you have the AI-focused AI in Education groups that deal with CALL as a subset of general Computer Aided Pedagogy. AIEd is a good example of this
- On the third hand, you have these folks from CALICO, a tight-knit group of (what seems to be mostly German) language teachers and linguists, interested in the practical use of building tools to automatically assess student input.
I am still, constantly surprised to see the lack of NLP in the CALL field. Even CALICO researchers seem to be stuck in the 90s, what with their rules-based rather than statistical approaches. Or, perhaps there are facets to the field of learner speech (high language interference effects, small corpora) that don’t lend themselves as well to pure statistical solutions.
As an aside, I should note the conference was held in Honolulu, Hawaii (Yes, yes, as one of my fellow conference-goers said, “it’s funny, people have such a different preconceptions when you tell them you’re going to a conference in Hawaii, as opposed to, say, Detroit”). I’ve put up a bunch of pictures from this year’s CALICO on my flickr account.