Exploring a New Grammatico-functional Type of Measure as Part of a Language Learning Expert System

Cyriel Mallart, Andrew Simpkin, Rmi Venant, Nicolas Ballier, Bernardo Stearns, Jen Yu Li, Thomas Gaillat


Abstract
This paper explores the use of L2-specific grammatical microsystems as elements of the domain knowledge of an Intelligent Computer-assisted Language Learning (ICALL) system. We report on the design of new grammatico-functional measures and their association with proficiency. We illustrate the approach with the design of the IT, THIS, THAT proform microsystem. The measures rely on the paradigmatic relations between words of the same linguistic functions. They are operationalised with one frequency-based and two probabilistic methods, i.e., the relative proportions of the forms and their likelihood of occurrence. Ordinal regression models show that the measures are significant in terms of association with CEFR levels, paving the way for their introduction in a specific proform microsystem expert model.
Anthology ID:
2023.bea-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
466–476
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.39
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.39
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cyriel Mallart, Andrew Simpkin, Rmi Venant, Nicolas Ballier, Bernardo Stearns, Jen Yu Li, and Thomas Gaillat. 2023. Exploring a New Grammatico-functional Type of Measure as Part of a Language Learning Expert System. In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 466–476, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring a New Grammatico-functional Type of Measure as Part of a Language Learning Expert System (Mallart et al., BEA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.39.pdf