NLP4CALL

Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning

All the following information is also available on the NLP4CALL2024 submission website.


13th Workshop on NLP4CALL 2024 Rennes, France, 25 & 26 October 2024

We are happy to announce that the 2024 edition of NLP4CALL will be held in France at Université Rennes 2. As a result of the growing interest in the domain, the workshop series will be held over two days. Paper presentations, poster and demo sessions will alternate to offer a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in the field.

Call for Papers

The workshop series on Natural Language Processing for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL) is a meeting place for researchers working on the integration of Natural Language Processing and Speech Technologies in CALL systems and exploring the theoretical and methodological issues arising in this connection. The latter includes, among others, insights from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, on the one hand, and promote the development of “Computational SLA” through setting up Second Language research infrastructure(s), on the other.

The intersection of Natural Language Processing (or Language Technology / Computational Linguistics) and Speech Technology with Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) brings “understanding” of language to CALL tools, thus making CALL intelligent. This fact has given the name for this area of research – Intelligent CALL, ICALL. As the definition suggests, apart from having excellent knowledge of Natural Language Processing and/or Speech Technology, ICALL researchers need good insights into second language acquisition theories and practices, as well as knowledge of second language pedagogy and didactics. This workshop invites therefore a wide range of ICALL-relevant research, including studies where NLP-enriched tools are used for testing SLA and pedagogical theories, and vice versa, where SLA theories, pedagogical practices or empirical data are modeled in ICALL tools.

The NLP4CALL workshop series is aimed at bringing together competencies from these areas for sharing experiences and brainstorming around the future of the field.

We welcome papers:

This year, a special focus is given to systems relying on AI trained for ICALL tasks. This includes, but not only, fine tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) and supervised-learning methods based on learning analytics. Issues related to data in SLA and learner corpus such as collection and feature extraction are also welcome.

Submission information

Authors are invited to submit long papers (8-12 pages) alternatively short or demo papers (4-7 pages), page count not including references. We will be using the NLP4CALL templates, downloadable also from the submission website.

Final camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be given an additional page to address reviewer comments.

Papers should describe original unpublished work or work-in-progress. Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a double-blind fashion. All accepted papers will be collected into a proceedings volume to be submitted for publication in the NEALT Proceeding Series (Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings) and, additionally, double-published through the ACL anthology, following experiences from the previous NLP4CALL editions.

Important dates

January 2024 - First call for papers
March - Second call for papers
May - Final call for papers
30 June - Paper submission deadline (long, short and demo)
1 September - Notification of acceptance
30 September - Camera-ready papers for publication
25-26 October 2024 - Workshop dates

Organizers

Université Rennes 2, France
Thomas Gaillat, Cyriel Mallart, Fabienne Moreau, Jen-Yu Li, Linguistique Ingénierie et Didactique des Langues (LIDILE)

University of Gothenburg, Sweden
David Alfter, Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH)
Elena Volodina, Språkbanken Text

Linköping University, Sweden
Arne Jönsson