CALL&CLIL2019: Keynote speakers

 

   

European Network for Combining Language Learning and Crowdsourcing

Lionel Nicolas & Verena Lyding

Institute for Applied Linguistics, Eurac Research, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy

 

Abstract: EnetCollect is a large international network aiming at performing the groundwork to set into motion a Research and Innovation trend combining the well-established domain of Language Learning with recent and successful crowdsourcing approaches. By doing so, enetCollect aims at unlocking a crowdsourcing potential available for all languages and at triggering an innovation breakthrough for the production of language learning material, such as lesson or exercise content, and language-related datasets, such as language resources. Unlocking such a crowdsourcing potential will allow to trigger in the context of Language Learning ground-breaking changes similar to those achieved by Wikipedia for the domain of the encyclopedia or Recaptcha for the domain of the OCRization.
EnetCollect has been funded for 4 years as a COST Action and was started in April 2017. It currently involves more than 200 members from 40 different countries with varied backgrounds (e.g. teachers, academics, engineers), interests (e.g. Language Learning, Computed Assisted Language Learning, Learner Corpus, Corpus Linguistics, Natural Language processing, E-Lexicography etc.) and work environments (e.g. universities, research centers, private companies and NGOs). During the talk, we will review the progression of enetCollect since it started two years ago, describe some of its major achievements so far and finally explain what is foreseen for its remaining two years of funding, as well as what is foreseen after it is concluded in April 2021.

Keywords: Language Learning, Crowdsourcing, COST Action

 

Authors´ profiles:

Verena Lyding is a computational linguist at the Institute for Applied Linguistics in Bolzano, Italy. Her research focusses on innovative approaches for the creation and exploitation of language resources and related infrastructures by means of transferring information visualization and, more recently, crowdsourcing approaches to application scenarios in linguistics, language teaching and the Digital Humanities.
Lionel Nicolas is a senior researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the Institute for Applied Linguistics in Bolzano, Italy. His research objectives focus (among other things) on practical guidelines for saving efforts when creating or improving linguistic resources, on the automatized transfer of linguistic knowledge between two closely related languages, on the automatized creation and extension of linguistic resources and on the combination of language learning and crowdsourcing for the purpose of creating linguistic resources.