Abstract: The talk will present an overview of Revita — a project in CALL: computer-aided language learning. We work specifically on learning beyond the elementary level — for intermediate to advanced learners. (Beginners receive adequate support from the many existing services and applications.) Revita aims to simulate a good teacher, by modeling and assessing the learner’s state and progress. An important aspect of our approach is allowing the user to learn from authentic materials — arbitrary texts, chosen by the users themselves.
Revita is the first AI-based system of scale that:
works beyond the elementary level, targeting intermediate to advanced learners;
is multi-lingual (English-only systems exist for advanced essay assessment);
is used in official university-level curricula, beyond “academic” experiments.
We are working on expanding to additional learning environments, and to additional languages.
Revita collects data, which allows us to analyze patterns of language learning in great depth and detail. We collect data about the learning process from actual learners — about typical mistakes, paths of progress, etc. This data provides a playground for research problems, which we will discuss, focusing on two sides of the research:
tools needed to collect and analyze the data, and
methods of analysis and applications of the collected data, which include neural networks, in particular, sequence-to-sequence models.
Bio: Roman Yangarber is an Associate Professor at the Department of Digital Humanities (DIGIHUM), University of Helsinki. Prior to moving to DIGIHUM, he led the research group in natural language processing at the Department of Computer Science, over the last 10 years. The group has been working on a variety of themes in NLP, researching how language works and how computers can better understand language. Research themes include analysis of news media and modeling language evolution. The more recent research — AI support for language learning — has resulted in a system used by end-users at several universities, and has won best paper awards at a Digital Humanities conference last year.
Speaker: Professor Roman Yangarber
Affiliation: Department of Digital Humanities, Helsinki University
Place of Seminar: Lecture Hall Exactum D122, University of Helsinki - CANCELED