Joining the blocks together – an NLP pipeline for CALL development

Abstract

Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) involves using tools and techniques from computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the language learning process. It is an inherently complex endeavour and is multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary in nature. Often these tools and techniques are designed for tasks and purposes other than language learning, and this makes their adaptation and use in the CALL domain difficult. It can be even more challenging for Less-Resourced Languages (LRLs) for CALL researchers to adapt or incorporate NLP into CALL artefacts. This paper reports on how two existing NLP resources for Irish, a morphological analyser and a parser, were used to develop an app for Irish. The app, Irish Word Bricks (IWB), was adapted from an existing CALL app – Word Bricks (Mozgovoy & Efimov, 2013). Without this ‘joining the blocks together’ approach, the development of the IWB app would certainly have taken longer, may not have been as efficient or effective, and may not even have been accomplished at all.