NLP and Speech Technologies in Advanced Language Sistems. Proceedings of InSTIL/ICALL 2004 Symposium on Computer Assisted Language Learning

The papers collected in this volume were presented at the InSTIL/ICALL2004 Symposium on Computer Assisted Language Learning, held at the University Ca’ Foscari – Venice, in June 2004. The symposium builds on the excellence and excitement of the ISCA workshop STiLL’98 , held in Marholmen, Sweden and previous InSTIL Symposia now held every two years. 2000 was held in Dundee and 2002 was held in Davis, Califormia. All events had previously been satellites of the conferences of parent associations such as EUROCALL (2000) or CALICO (2002). It is a credit to developments in the field that we can now run an event on its own. The Programme Committee received 60 submissions from which 46 papers were finally accepted, 28 of which were regarded appropriate for oral presentations and the remaining 18 for poster presentations. Every paper was reviewed by two referees from the Committee. One of the main goals of the Symposium was to bring together the full range of researchers working in the two neighbouring and often overlapping fields of Natural Language and Speech Technologies research oriented towards Language Learning and Tutoring. 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. Research areas may concern Second language oriented research but also First Language learning in presence of language deficiencies - deafness, dislexia - and sign language. The success of the Symposium can be judged by the range of topics explored by the papers collected here. In the area of Speech Technology we have: • Phonetic Tools • Prosodic Tools • Pronunciation Error Detection • Speech Recognition for children and adult speech • Speech Synthesis • Speech Translation • Reading Assistant In the area of NLP Technology we have: ➢ Grammar Checkers ➢ Electronic Dictionaries and Lexical learning ➢ Evaluating NLP ➢ Automatic Summary Evaluation ➢ Text Generation ➢ Grammar Instruction and Automatic Feedback In the area of Animated Agents and Dialogue, we have: • Task-Oriented and typed Spoken Dialogue Systems • Spoken Conversation Interaction and Explanatory Dialogues • Animated Agents as Collaborative Tutors