Towards Adaptive CALL:
Natural Language Processing for Diagnostic Language Assessment
Friday, September 21 and Saturday, September 22, 2007
Iowa State University
Final Report
On Friday, September 21, and Saturday, September 22, 2007, faculty from the TESL/Applied Linguistics and Technology Program in the Department of English hosted the fifth annual Conference on Technology for Second Language Learning. The focus this year was on Towards Adaptive CALL: Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Diagnostic Language Assessment.
The conference brought concepts and issues together deploying interesting discussions from four different aspects: (a) adaptivity, (b) NLP in language assessment, (c) learner data, diagnosis, and language acquisition, and (d) authenticity in language assessment. Dr. Robert Mislevy in University of Maryland was a keynote speaker, and five other experts in language assessment and NLP were invited to address the topic from various perspectives. The invited speakers were Eunice Eunhee Jang (University of Toronto), Yong-Won Lee (Seoul National University, South Korea), Nathan Carr (California State University, Fullerton), Xiaoming Xi (Educational Testing Service), and Mathias Schulze (University of Waterloo).
Presenters came from the Northern Arizona University, Georgetown University, the Ohio State University, Nassau Community College, Ordinate Corporation, Southern Medical University, China, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Iowa State University.
Participants found the conference stimulating and worthwhile and the TESL/ALT faculty are planning to host another conference in 2008.
The organizers and participants of the 2007 conference are grateful for a grant from the TOEFL® Grants and Awards Program at Educational Testing Service for making this conference possible. We also thank the Department of English and World Languages and Culture as well as the Program in Linguistics at Iowa State University for their financial support.
View the program or some photos taken during the conference.
Proceeding papers can be found here.