Sorry, I'm generally really loud, so if it gets loud, just cover your ears and it'll
be my sign to keep it down.
So hi, my name is Camilia, and today we're going to be talking about the VL3 project
that is part of the Cultureplex Laboratory, and it's basically short for Virtual Laboratory
for Language Learning.
What it basically is in a nutshell is a platform that allows language learners to practice
their conversational skills in what we hope to provide an environment that is as closely
as possible imitating real life situations.
I'll talk about it in more detail, and then at the end if you have any questions you can
go ahead and ask.
So why did we come up with this project?
Basically to solve a real problem that any of you that have taught or have taken languages
would know that the problem that usually language learners have is that they don't have enough
opportunities to practice their language, their target language, and therefore barely
ever do they achieve native-like competence in their target language.
So this is where the VL3 comes, hoping to sort of not entirely solve that problem, but
yes target it.
What's the idea behind it?
Basically what we're hoping to provide is the virtual environment, which is that of
the VL3, where we would allow language learner to chat in the target language and eventually
achieve improved communicative competence in the language that we're learning.
Right now we have started with Spanish based on our, because we are part of the Hispanic
Studies program at Western and based on our experience, but we are also working on English,
French, and it will be developed for further languages later on as well.
How did we approach this?
It's a multidisciplinary project, evidently.
It brings together at least these four fields, linguistic, second language acquisition, pedagogy,
and natural language processing, which is a subfield of computer science.
And right now I'm going to be talking about the theoretical points that we have been working
with to put this project together, so a little bit of the background, what we know from all
of these fields theoretically and how we have sort of worked these ideas into the project
that we will be presenting today.
So very basically from linguistics, we know that learning a language basically means syntax,
learning syntax, it's phonology, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics.
So that's what language is composed of, so that's what language learners aim to acquire.
From second language acquisition, we know that you can't learn a language without input.
Human theories have shown that through interaction, you can acquire the language faster and eventually
we hope to achieve automaticity in that language, so we are able to produce the language automatically
without really thinking of it as a second language.
And from teaching, we distinguish between linguistic competence and communicative competence,
and most often what happens in formal language settings, language learning settings, is that
learners achieve linguistic competence hardly ever do they achieve communicative competence,
and this is where, this is a problem that we're trying to tackle through this project.
Why do language learners not achieve communicative competence as often as we would like them
to?
Well mainly because there are very limited opportunities for them to interact with native
speakers or in situations where they're able to freely produce the language.
And from natural language processing, we are dealing mainly with natural language understanding,
natural language generation, and dialogue systems, which are the main ideas behind the
VL3 project.
And what is the VL3 project?
Well based on all the theoretical points that I've presented very briefly, we have put together
the VL3, this platform that we have built a lexicon for, a grammars, we've built scenarios
where learners will be able to produce the language, we've set conversation goals, and
moreover we are providing learners with feedback on their errors, so giving them another learning
tool that way.
And finally, the VL3 are working on a mobile application of the VL3.
I'm going to let Antonio talk about some of the technical points, and then I'll take
over from that.
As Camelia said, the VL3 project is composed of various parts, and we'll be discussing
the details of these parts through the remainder of the presentation.
The first part is the web interface.
Web interface is basically what you see, and in this case, the interface of the VL3
is a website where the users can chat, can interact with the virtual assistant, and can
manage their profile.
What are those users?
Well, the VL3 is intended for two types of users, the language learner and the language
teacher or researcher.
The engine is the main component of the VL3, and it's a technological platform whose task
is to process the user's inputs and generate the system's outputs.
It's composed mostly of these three modules, the grammar processor, the diagram manager,
and the response generator.
The grammar processor translates the natural language user's inputs into formal internal
representations.
The diagram manager controls the flow of the conversation, and the response generator produces
coherent system outputs into natural language to the user.
Another component is the lexicon.
The lexicon is the set of known words.
That is the set of words that the system understands and can process.
Our lexicon is a database with over 1 million words classified in lexical categories and
annotated with values for certain features.
For example, in this case, we have a noun, and the features are degree, interpretation,
type, gender, and number.
The grammar is, I'd say, the most important part of the project.
A grammar is a set of words that determines how to build correct expressions in a language.
We designed very specific rules, scenario-oriented rules, based on general and common lexical
and syntactic categories.
The VL3 grammar processor manages attribute grammars.
These attributes allow to check conditions and detect errors and synthesize values from
the features of the lexical categories to the top level of the syntactic tree in order
to provide feedback to the user.
This is an example of a conversation with the virtual assistant.
In Spanish, if there is someone here that can speak Spanish, can check that it's very
close to a real conversation between two people.
At the end of the conversation, the student is evaluated and feedback provided.
I'm going to quickly wrap this up.
As you've seen, we built a lexicon, a grammar platform for the VL3 where the learner can
go and basically chat in the target language.
Like Antonio was saying, everything is scenario-specific, so it's task-oriented for those of you that
are familiar with language teaching or teaching in general, task-oriented goals.
Every scenario is based, has a task.
At the end of this scenario, the learner is told, at the end of the scenario, you're supposed
to have greeted, you're supposed to have used at least one of these verbs, present tense,
words, whatever the requirements are, the learner is familiar with that all the way.
This is a more formal approach, however, the learner doesn't really need to follow it.
If it's a learner who just wants to practice chatting in Spanish, they can also do it.
However, somebody that is taking Spanish more formally could be guided by this as well.
Eventually, once they're done, the VL3 gives them, for those interested, feedback on all
of the targets that we had established per scenario, they can see the score that they
obtained, their final result, and furthermore, they can go into details.
On the, like Antonio was saying, another possible user for the VL3 are the researchers, the
linguists or language, people that study language in general.
There's a lot of information input by the user here that is stored on the platform, and
the way language evolves can be seen from point A to point Z whenever they reach a more
advanced state.
So that is what we mean by a research side of the user.
And finally, this is the beginning state of the VL3 app that has been designed for
the iPhone and iPad.
Everything I just want to mention that this is still in the developing stage.
We do have a website that you guys can check at any time right now.
We're having some technical difficulties we would like to show it to you, but normally,
you can go and sign up for the scenarios that are available, and if you're somewhat
familiar with Spanish, you can probably figure out how to handle a conversation.
So feel free to do that.
Like I said, right now, it's not working, but it should be up and running soon, and
if you have any questions, you can always send us an email or any suggestions, and we'll
be happy to get back to you.
This is it for now, so...
Thank you very much for that.
As mentioned, we'll have questions at the end, so there should be time for some discussion
with any luck.
So now I'd like to invite the second speaker, while he's coming, to set up the PowerPoint
and so on.
It's a pleasure to introduce Professor Erhard Hinrichs at the University of Tübingen, who's
going to be talking about his project on automatic mining of valence compounds for German.
Okay, thanks.
This is joint work with Anna Brock, a very nice Henry.