Background: Pedagogical agents are computerized talking heads or embodied animated avatars that help students learn by performing actions and holding conversations with the students in natural language. Dialogues occur between a tutor agent and the student in the case of AutoTutor and other intelligent tutoring systems with natural language…

For the new approaches to language e-learning (e.g. language blended learning, language autonomous learning or mobile-assisted language learning) to succeed, some automatic functions for error correction (for instance, in exercises) will have to be included in the long run in the corresponding environments and/or applications. A possible way to…

Usage-based approaches explore how we learn language from our experience of language. Related research thus involves the analysis of the usage from which learners learn and of learner usage as it develops. This program involves considerable data recording, transcription, and analysis, using a variety of corpus and computational techniques, many of…

Presentation of raw text to language learners is not enough to ensure learning. Thus, we present the Smart and Immersive Language Learning Environment (SMILLE), a system that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) for enhancing grammatical information in texts chosen by a given user. The enhancements, carried out by means of text highlighting, are…

This study investigated the effect of cloze item practice on reading comprehension, where cloze items were either created by humans, by machine using natural language processing techniques, or randomly. Participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 302) took a pre-test, read a text, and took part in one of five conditions, Do-Nothing, Re-Read,…

Writing a good essay typically involves students revising an initial paper draft after receiving feedback. We present eRevise, a web-based writing and revising environment that uses natural language processing features generated for rubric-based essay scoring to trigger formative feedback messages regarding students' use of evidence in…

The 27th European Association of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) conference was hosted by UCLouvain in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), in collaboration with KU Leuven, from the 28th to the 31st of August 2019. The theme selected for the 2019 EuroCALL conference held in Louvain-la-Neuve was "CALL and complexity." As languages…

We present SimpleApprenant, a platform aiming to improve French L2 learners' knowledge of Multi Word Expressions (MWEs). SimpleApprenant integrates an MWE database annotated with the Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) level and several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools: a spelling checker, a parser, and a set of…

Software is an integral part of our lives. It controls the cars we drive every day, the ships we send into space, and even our toasters. It is everywhere and we can easily download more. Software solves many real-world problems and satisfies many needs. Thus, unsurprisingly, there is a rising demand for software engineers to maintain existing…

We address the issue of consumer privacy against the backdrop of the national priority of maintaining global leadership in artificial intelligence, the ongoing research in Artificial Cognitive Assistants, and the explosive growth in the development and application of Voice Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs) such as Alexa and Siri, spurred on by…

Using a natural language processing tool, this study examined participant discourse in personalized learning schools to better understand what personalized learning looks like in practice. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used to identify the significant words and potential emergent themes for 134 interview transcripts. This…

Open-ended, short-answer questions, referred to as constructed responses (CR), allow students to express knowledge and skills through their own words. While CRs can reduce the likelihood of guessing correct answers, they also enable students to provide errant responses due to a lack of knowledge or a misunderstanding of the question.…

Boolean logic can be a difficult concept for first-year, introductory students to grasp. This paper compares the results of Boolean and natural language searching across several databases with searches created from student research questions. Performance differences between databases varied. Overall, natural search language is at least as good as…

This paper presents a rule-based task-oriented dialogue system for second language learning and a knowledge extraction method which automatically extracts the training data for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and dialogue rules for dialogue management from a Dialogue Map (DM). The DM consists of turn-by-turn utterances between the system and…

This study investigated the impact of anonymizing text on predicted scores made by two kinds of automated scoring engines: one that incorporates elements of natural language processing (NLP) and one that does not. Eight data sets (N = 22,029) were used to form both training and test sets in which the scoring engines had access to both text and…