Who is this website for?

Members of EUROCALL who are interested in Natural Language Processing and its application to CALL. The EUROCALL NLP SIG closely collaborates with the CALICO ICALL SIG.

Why have a SIG in Natural Language Processing?
We feel that research in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, Corpus-Driven and Corpus Linguistics, Formal Linguistics, Machine Aided Translation, Machine Translation, Natural Language Interfaces, Natural Language Processing, Theoretical Linguistics has produced results which have proven, are proving and will prove very useful in the field of Computer-Assisted Language Learning.

A SIG in Natural Language Processing can therefore facilitate information exchange between individual EUROCALL and CALICO ICALI members interested in or already working in one of the above fields. As many of us do, we view CALL as an interdisciplinary area of research and development. In this SIG, we will bring together members with a background and/or interest in these neighbouring disciplines in order to provide a forum for discussion content language processing approaches to language, language learning, and language teaching in the field of CALL.

What is the SIG in Natural Language Processing doing?

First and foremost, we see this SIG as an opportunity for individuals within the CALL community who share our interest in one or more of the above neighbouring disciplines to meet, to discuss topics of common interest, to organise collaboration and co-operation. This does not need to be done exclusively via additional meetings during EUROCALL/CALICO conferences, but can also be facilitated by clearly identifying papers given by SIG members as supported by the SIG and by organising specialist workshops during or between conferences.

We view language processing approaches as a sub-spectrum of a much wider spectrum of approaches within CALL. The SIG is helping to make the results of language processing research more widely known in the CALL community. This is done via pre-conference workshops organised by SIG members. We intend to organise some form of collaboration with the SIG in ICALI in CALICO and we are interested in setting up links with special interest groups or similar organisations.