Skip to content

Talk: Pedagogical Contextualization of Language Learner Speech Errors

05-May-06

I’ll be giving a presentation next Friday at 3pm, as part of the Natural Lanuage Processing seminar series, addressing some of my work with the Tactical Language project.

All are welcome to attend.

This talk will be a preview of the work I’ll be presenting at CALICO this year.

—-
Time: 3-4pm, Friday 2006/05/12
Location: 11-CR, ISI
Title: Pedagogical Contextualization of Language Learner Speech Errors
Abstract:

The traditional approach to diagnosing learner speech errors in Computer Aided Language Learning is to create a linguistic profile of the learner/user. We, however, propose that work must also be done to model the linguistic profile of a typcial native listener.

Not all errors in second langage learner speech are created equal. Different errors sound more “severe” or “harsh” to native speaker ears and should therefore be treated with more emphasis in pedagogical interaction.

The Tactical Language Training System (TLTS) is a speech-enabled virtual-reality based computer learning environment designed to teach Arabic spoken communication to American English speakers. This talk addresses the ways the TLTS contextualizes non-native speech errors, and how this contextualization fits in the corrective exchanges between a non-native learner and a pedagogical agent built to model a native listener.

The pedagogical system used in TLTS includes:

  • Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models which are built on a combination of both annnotated and unannotated non-native speech with native speech data.
  • A stochastic generative model for errors in learner speech that creates mispronunciation grammars for the ASR
  • Reweighting of system-perceived mispronunciation severity based on aggregate native speaker judgements of quality pronunciation and intelligiblity.
  • Contextualization of feedback based on lexical and phonetic inventories of the native and non-native languages.
Filed in General | | Comments Off

Two More Hurdles Jumped

04-May-06

Ah. Just submitted a summer research proposal last night and my MS thesis this morning (you can read the MS thesis here). Now all I have left is to finish up the slides for CALICO and to wrap up my PhD thesis proposal. Busy, busy, busy.

Filed in General | | Comments Off

Cleanup

03-May-06

Huh. Leonard got filelight working on his mac. Not willing to headache with fink unstable, I searched around for another solution, and found Disk Inventory X. DIX isn’t bad by any means. It reminds me of SequoiaView, a favorite app of mine from my windows days. DIX’s UI is a bit slow (if, by “a bit”, you mean “glacially”), but its sorted metadata display is really neat (i.e. how much space is taken up, not only by directory path, but also by filetype).

I’d been suffering for space on my too-small-harddrive iBook, and the results of the scan were surprising: 1.5Gb iDVD.app? Deleted. Another 1.2Gb encyclopedia? I haven’t used an encyclopedia in years–that’s what wikipedia is for. Deleted.

Filed in General | | Comments Off

On Rexa

30-Apr-06

Rexa, a new player in community bibliography management, was opened to the public a couple weeks ago.

Here’s a blog post from the PI on this project (Andrew McCallum) who details the announcement, and a little more here, from Matthew Hurst’s Data Mining blog.

A cursory use of the system shows it to be a sort of “new generation citeseer”, with a little smarter NLP and data mining, and a halfhearted attempt at facet-driven organization. They mention folksonomy in explaining their tags, but from what I can tell, implementation seems to be more like straight-up facet-based personal information management, rather than actual tag-sharing and folksonomy. But, it’s a start. And, the release is accompanied by promises to make it smarter (especially on the data mining side).

All I can say is, you can tell it was made by NLP guys and data miners and not social software guys. Interface-wise, it’s not too friendly (eh? I need to create an account before I can even begin browsing through it?? Before I’m even presented with a link to the “about” page??). And the interface looks like it was designed by a C++ monkey rather than an HTML monkey.

And I won’t even comment on the poor coverage of publications (Andrew promises to improve this). Err, actually looks like I did just comment.

These things being said, they have some GREAT approaches: smart data mining, as well as automatic extraction of author and grant profiles along with the usual paper aggregation (and with promise of forthcoming extraction/aggregation of conferences and research communities!)… it looks like they realize that research (like soylent green) is made of PEOPLE and not just papers.

The thing that really excites me is the suggested examples of tags that the use as seeds for the future folksonomy:

“hot”, “seminal”, “classic”, “controversial”, “enjoyable”

This is exciting because, if this tagging becomes more widespread and mainstream, we’ll FINALLY have a better metric of the value of a publication in academia. Think about it, right now, there are only two kinds of people that can tell the rest of the academic world that a paper is “valuable”: (1) the people on the acceptance/review committee for a conference or journal, and (2) the people who choose to cite a paper in the bibliography of their own publications. And, both of these aren’t too good–the first group is very exclusive and small in number (and at best biased, and at worst unknowledgable in the research niche of a paper’s focus), and the second group requires a high investment of investment to communicate value (need to publish a paper, just to put in a vote–and who ever reads bibliographies closely anyways, unless they’re already looking for something specific)?

The upshot is that, of so many people who read an article, only a very small few get to formally, aggregatably comment on its worth. That’s a lot of untapped, already-invested effort. I would love to see some sort of paper ranking system become more mainstream!

Filed in computer science, General, research | | Comments Off

It’s All Relative

28-Apr-06

Signed up for a beta account on plazes, and, by pure coincidence, the one person online in my area was a guy named Greg Mote. This piqued my curiousity, so I dropped him an email. It looks like we’re related somewhere betweeen 6 and 10 generations back.

Greg, if you read this, my apologies for taking the “mote” username on flickr, delicious, and so many others of those web applications. =p.

The brief exchange we had about genalogy reminds me, I should copy down that family tree that’s hanging on the wall next time I go back home to visit the folks.

Filed in General | | Comments (1) »

Monet’s Lilies Shuddering

21-Apr-06 
Monet never knew
              he was painting his "Lilies" for
      a lady from the Chicago Art Institute
          who went to France and filmed
              today's lilies
              by the "Bridge at Giverny"
                  a leaf afloat among them
      the film of which now flickers
          at the entrance to his framed visions
              with a Debussy piano soundtrack
flooding with a new fluorescence (fleur-essence?)
      the rooms and rooms
              of waterlilies

Monet caught a Cloud in a Pond
               in 1903
      and got a first glimpse
                      of its lilies and for twenty years returned
      again and again to paint them
          which now gives us the impression
              that he floated thru life on them
                              and their reflections
          which he also didn�t know
              we would also have occasion
                          to reflect upon
Anymore than he could know
          that John Cage would be playing a
              "Cello with Melody-driven Electronics"
                      tonight at the University of Chicago
And making those Lilies shudder and shed
                                  black light

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1950s

The thing I like most about this poem is the underlying conflict between expressionism/impressionism, but how that’s totally unnecessary to aesthetically enjoying the poem. Irony?

(aside: Poetry sucks in html. This is the best fix I could find. My apologies.)

Filed in poetry | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Artists as Filters

16-Apr-06

I caught the Pelt Quartet down at the Jazz Bakery a while back, and–aside from the amazing music, of course–it got me thinking about the idea of artists as being filters, in addition to creators.

Me, I wish I had more time to get into Jazz. Jazz music is like red wine–compared to white wine, I find that reds go the full gamut between vile and amazing–there’s a much bigger difference between a good red and bad red than between a good white and bad white. And, aside from some extraordinary whites, I find that drinking a red takes a lot more practice to discern the subtleties. I’m beginning to catch them, but experience slowly brings out new layers.

Anyways, big digression. My main point is that I don’t know red wines as much as I like, but that I don’t know jazz nearly enough as I’d like. There’s so much subtlety to a trumpeter’s style, or the interaction/contrast between a bassist and drummer–honestly, most of the time that I’m listening I can only see the vague outlines of something deeper, that I can appreciate superficially but know I’ll appreciate more as I get more experience.

So, that’s my context, as a novice listener, not too familiar with trends in the genre. It hit me, while listening, that artists don’t only create: they also summarize for their audience. They capture the zeitgeist of their field at the moment of composing or improvising. Now, this idea isn’t mature just yet. I think it hinges on the well-worn “man is a product of his surroundings” idea. But I like how it brings out the facet of artists as performing a summarizing, information-relaying task to the listener, aside from what we normally expect of them.

It’s like tech bloggers consolidating/aggregating, acting as filters to all the news, because too much of it is happening for readers to have time to spend all day doing the information extraction for themselves. It seems like creators (as opposed to pure performers) like painters, composers, improvists, perform the same function for audience with trends in their specialty of art.

Huh.

Filed in General | | Comments (2) »

NY Times: We do not ride the railroad; It rides upon us.

08-Apr-06

“We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”

NY Times reports on journalists dumbing down headlines so that they can get higher googlejuice.

Filed in General | | Comments Off

On The Success of LaTeX

31-Mar-06

I suspect that the success of LaTeX–and its ubiquity as a format for thesis-writing–is in part due to the fact that learning its arcane subtleties is a wonderful source of procrastination.

What a glorious escape from having do to actual paper-writing!

Filed in computer science, General, research | | Comments (2) »

AskMefi on Language Learning

21-Mar-06

A fun thread on mefi this morning, “What is the most efficient way to learn the native language of a country while traveling there on your own?”.  One of the most interesting parts of this thread is that some of the commenters seem to have a natural feel for the language learning techniques I only learned in theory, in second language acquisition classes.  Most of the good advice points to the relational aspect of language.  Language’s base purpose is communication, and communication’s base purpose is relationship building… I guess it’s natural that the best way to learn language is to pursue relationships in the target culture.  I used to think that it was just because target-culture relationships afforded more opportunity to practice the language.  Now I think it’s more than that–there’s also something deeply, inherently motivating about target-culture relationships, how friendships drive us to want to communicate, and how the desire to communicate drives us in turn to learn the language.

Filed in General | | Comments (4) »