Prof. Dr. Walt Detmar Meurers
Publications
Little Things With Big Effects: On the Identification and Interpretation of Tokens for Error Diagnosis in ICALL

  

Luiz Amaral and Detmar Meurers

  

CALICO Journal 26 (3). 2009.

  

Error diagnosis in ICALL typically analyzes the learner input in an attempt to abstract and identify indicators of the learner's (mis)conceptions of the linguistic properties. For written input, this process usually starts with the identification of tokens that will serve as the atomic building blocks of the analysis. In this paper, we discuss the consequences of mismatches between the learner's perception of a given token and the system's interpretation of its linguistic properties. Based on our analysis of the interaction of beginning learners of Portuguese with the ICALL system TAGARELA, we discuss why tokenization and the interpretation of accented characters deserve particular attention in a system used by language learners. On the computational side, we argue that the mismatches arising in such cases can be addressed in a general way by building ICALL systems on an annotation-based Natural Language Processing architecture which monotonically enriches the representation of the learner input.

  


  

Electronically available file formats:

  

Note: The electronic versions of the publications linked on this page are the last versions I had the copyright for. Where a publisher copyedited and/or typeset the papers, the electronic copies linked here are NOT identical to the officially published version, which should be used for any quotes, references to page numbers, etc.

  


  

Bibtex entry:

 
   @Article{amaral:meurers:09,
   author = 	 {Luiz Amaral and Detmar Meurers},
   title = 	 {Little Things With Big Effects: 
                  On the Identification and Interpretation of Tokens for 
                  Error Diagnosis in ICALL},
   journal = 	 {CALICO Journal},
   volume =      {26},
   number =      {3},
   year = 	 {2009},
   pages = 	 {580--591},
   url =         {http://purl.org/dm/papers/amaral-meurers-09.html}
   }