Positioning in learning networks is the process of establishing a starting point and an efficient route along which a learner may build competences. We investigate computational approaches to services such as positioning that avoid or reduce labor-intense procedures and that are based on the contents of the learning network and the behavior of those participating in it, rather than in predefine...

The importance of collocations in the context of second language learning is generally acknowledged. Studies show that the “collocation density" in learner corpora is nearly the same as in native corpora, i.e., that use of collocations by learners is as common as it is by native speakers, while the collocation error rate in learner corpora is about ten times as high as in native reference corpo...

The importance of collocations in the context of second language learning is generally acknowledged. Studies show that the “collocation density" in learner corpora is nearly the same as in native corpora, i.e., that use of collocations by learners is as common as it is by native speakers, while the collocation error rate in learner corpora is about ten times as high as in native reference corpo...

1 Background and objectives of the project 1.1 Background The most prevalent forms of information technology in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications are email, multimedia and computerised multiple-choice test forms. Until recently, the contribution of language technology (LT) to CALL has been next to nonexistent, although there is now a growing amount of work in the LT commun...

Researchers working with learner corpora promise quantitative results that would be of greater practical value in areas such as CALL than those from small-scale and qualitative studies. However, learner corpus research has not yet had an impact on practices in teaching and assessment. Significant methodological issues need to be examined if results from learner corpus research are going to prov...

This paper describes WriteAhead, a resource-rich, Interactive Writing Environment that provides L2 learners with writing prompts, as well as ”get it right” advice, to helps them write fluently and accurately. The method involves automatically analyzing reference and learner corpora, extracting grammar patterns with example phrases, and computing dubious, overused patterns. At run-time, as the u...

In this paper we report on an unsupervised approach to learning Categorial Grammar (CG) lexicons. The learner is provided with a set of possible lexical CG categories , the forward and backward application rules of CG and unmarked positive only corpora. Using the categories and rules, the sentences from the corpus are probabilis-tically parsed. The parses and the history of previously parsed se...