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.

We present the design of a tool for the visualisation of linguistic complexity in second language (L2) learner writings. We show how metrics can be exploited to visualise complexity in L2 writings in relation to CEFR levels.

Cet article décrit un prototype axé sur la prédiction du niveau de compétence des apprenants de l’anglais. Le système repose sur un modèle d’apprentissage supervisé, couplé à une interface web.

This research investigates the collocational errors made by English learners in a learner corpus. It focuses on the extraction of unexpected collocations. A system was proposed and implemented with open source toolkit. Firstly, the collocation extraction module was evaluated by a corpus with manually annotated collocations. Secondly, a standard collocation list was collected from a corpus of native speaker. Thirdly, a list of unexpected collocations was generated by extracting candidates from a learner corpus and discarding the standard collocations on the list. The overall performance was evaluated, and possible sources of error were pointed out for future improvement.

This paper describes the workflow and architecture adopted by a linguistic research project. We report our experience and present the research outputs turned into resources that we wish to share with the community. We discuss the current limitations and the next steps that could be taken for the scaling and development of our research project. Allying NLP and language-centric AI, we discuss similar projects and possible ways to start collaborating towards potential platform interoperability.

This paper focuses on aspect extraction which is a sub-task of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. The goal is to report an extraction method of financial aspects in microblog messages. Our approach uses a stock-investment taxonomy for the identification of explicit and implicit aspects. We compare supervised and unsupervised methods to assign predefined categories at message level. Results on 7 aspect classes show 0.71 accuracy, while the 32 class classification gives 0.82 accuracy for messages containing explicit aspects and 0.35 for implicit aspects.

FinSentiA: Sentiment Analysis in English Financial Microblogs The objective of this paper is to report on the building of a Sentiment Analysis (SA) system dedicated to financial microblogs in English. The purpose of our work is to build a financial classifier that predicts the sentiment of stock investors in microblog platforms such as StockTwits and Twitter. Our contribution shows that it is possible to conduct such tasks in order to provide fine grained SA of financial microblogs. We extracted financial entities with relevant contexts and assigned scores on a continuous scale by adopting a deep learning method for the classification.