Institutes & CentersInstitute for Applied Linguistics - Language technologies - Projects - enetCollect

enetCollect

European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques

The enetCollect Action addresses the major European challenge of fostering the language skills of all citizens regardless of their diversified social, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. To this end, the Action is concerned with the domain of Language Learning and focuses on enhancing the production of learning material in order to cope with the increasing demand for language learning and the striking diversification of learner profiles due to the intensified migration flows motivated by educational, professional/economic or geopolitical circumstances.

EnetCollect addresses this challenge by performing the groundwork to set into motion a Research and Innovation trend combining the well-established domain of Language Learning with recent and successful crowdsourcing approaches in order to unlock a crowdsourcing potential available for all languages and trigger an innovation breakthrough for the production of language learning material. EnetCollect approaches this objective by building an international and interdisciplinary R&I community, creating a comprehensive theoretical framework and running prototypical experiments while following an overall Open Science, Open Access and Open Data policy.

EnetCollect also aims at simultaneously crowdsourcing language learning material and language-related datasets in order to attract language-related Research and Innovation players e.g. computational linguistics, gain their support, and develop the Research and Innovation trend in numerous, concurrent and mutually beneficial ways favoring its flexible short- and long-term success.

As a result, enetCollect will constitute the first step towards the sustainable and continuous production of language learning material for any language and target group.

Project duration: March 2017 - September 2021
Project status:
Website: http://enetcollect.eurac.edu/
Institute: Institute for Applied Linguistics

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Scientific Publications

Inbook2021

Introducing an implicit crowdsourcing opportunity to teachers

Nicolas L, Ostanina-Olszewska J, Arhar Holdt Š, Borg, C, Čibej J, Lyding V, Barreiro A

Lionel Nicolas

This paper aims at attracting attention towards crowdsourcing opportunities for the language teaching community. It presents and discusses a specific crowdsourcing paradigm designed to mass-produce exercise content for different languages by involving their language learners online. The discussion of the implicit crowdsourcing paradigm is framed by a broader look at the current situation regarding crowdsourcing and language learning. Therefore, we first introduce the concept of crowdsourcing, report on the teacher perspective and discuss common objections and practical challenges with regard to the compatibility of the language learning community with crowdsourcing in terms of expertise, motivation and feasibility. The implicit crowdsourcing paradigm we introduce proposes an approach for automatically generating language learning resources and, at the same time, crowdsourcing language-related datasets. It is designed to exploit a synergy between the language learning community and R&I partners working in language-related areas. The proposed approach is one of multiple experimental initiatives, which are being studied and explored within the enetCollect COST Action (European Network for Combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques). We conclude the paper with a discussion on our efforts to raise awareness among the varied stakeholders so as to foster the creation of tools implementing the crowdsourcing paradigm.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3726/b18131

Journal article2020

Language Teachers and Crowdsourcing: Insights from a Cross-European Survey

Arhar Holdt Š, Zviel-Girshin R, Gajek E, Durán-Muñoz I, Bago P, Fort K, Hatipoğlu Ç, Kasperavičienė R,

Lorenzo Zanasi

The paper presents a cross-European survey on teachers and crowdsourcing. The survey examines how familiar language teachers are with the concept of crowdsourcing and addresses their attitude towards including crowdsourcing into language teaching activities. The survey was administrated via an online questionnaire and collected volunteers’ data on: (a) teachers’ experience with organizing crowdsourcing activities for students/pupils, (b) the development of crowdsourced resources and materials as well as (c) teachers’ motivation for participating in or employing crowdsourcing activities. The questionnaire was disseminated in over 30 European countries. The final sample comprises 1129 language teachers aged 20 to 65, mostly working at institutions of tertiary education. The data indicates that many participants are not familiar with the concept of crowdsourcing resulting in a low rate of crowdsourcing activities in the classroom. However, a high percentage of responding teachers is potentially willing to crowdsource teaching materials for the language(s) they teach. They are particularly willing to collaborate with other teachers in the creation of interactive digital learning materials, and to select, edit, and share language examples for exercises or tests. Since the inclusion of crowdsourcing activities in language teaching is still in its initial stage, steps for further research are highlighted.

DOI

DOI: 10.31724/rihjj.46.1.1

Conference proceedings article2020

Substituto - A Synchronous Educational Language Game for Simultaneous Teaching and Crowdsourcing

Araneta MG, Eryigit G, König A, Lee Ji-Ung, Luís AR, Lyding V, Nicolas L, Rodosthenous C,

Lionel Nicolas

This paper investigates a general framework for synchronous educational language games that simultaneously allows researchers to crowdsource learner answers in a controlled environment. Our prototype Substituto allows teachers and students to interact in real-time while undergoing language learning exercises; ensuring that the learner's progress is not hurt by the introduction of crowdsourc-ing elements. We evaluate Substituto with a small-scale user study that focuses on training the use of English verb-particle constructions (VPCs), such as break down or take over, and test their use with second language learners of English of different proficiency levels over five pilot sessions. With the study we aim to ensure that our prototypical implementation behaves as expected and to identify any major design flaws that should be addressed. The preliminary results we achieved in order to evaluate the educational value, the user experience and the crowdsourcing capacity of Substituto confirm that it has the potential to become a valuable asset for language learning, a pleasant learning instrument and a crowdsourcing tool for collecting linguistic knowledge.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.3384/ecp201759

Journal article2018

enetCollect: A New European Network for combining Language Learning with Crowdsourcing Techniques

Agerri R, Maritxalar M, Lyding V, Nicolas L

Lionel Nicolas

We present enetCollect, a large European COST action network set upwith the aim of promoting a research trend combining the well-established domain of Language Learning with recent and successful crowdsourcing approaches. More specifically, the challenge of enetCollect is to foster the language skills of all citizens regardless of their backgrounds by enhancing the production of language learning material using Crowdsourcing techniques. In order to do so, the action will create a balanced interdisciplinary community of active stakeholders related to content- creation, content-usage, and Learning/Content Management Systems to create a theoretical framework for achieving a shared understanding of Language Learning and Crowdsourcing. This will allow to unlock the crowdsourcing potential available for language learning and to facilitate the development of prototypical experiments for the production of language learning material, such as lesson or exercise content. These activities would potentially benefit a wide range of users and languages.

DOI Source

DOI: 10.26342/2018-61-25

All Publications

Can computers generate language learning exercises?
Nicolas L (2023)
Internet

More information: https://www.eurac.edu/en/blogs/connecting-the-dots/can-c ...

https://doi.org/10.57708/bnqqd9k9hqo-5hl42udukmg

An Experiment on Implicitly Crowdsourcing Expert Knowledge about Romanian Synonyms from L1 Language Learners
Nicolas L, Aparaschivei L, Lyding V, Rodosthenous C, Sangati F, König A, Forascu C (2021)
Conference proceedings article

Conference: 10th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL 2021) | Reykjavik | 31.5.2021 - 31.5.2021

More information: https://ep.liu.se/ecp/177/001/ecp2021177001.pdf

https://hdl.handle.net/10863/19660

Implicitly Crowdsourcing Expert Knowledge about Romanian: Synonyms from Language Learners
Nicolas L (2021)
Presentation/Speech

Conference: 10th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning (NLP4CALL 2021) | Reykjavik | 31.5.2021 - 31.5.2021

https://hdl.handle.net/10863/18565

Project Team

Lionel Nicolas

Project Manager

Verena Ruth Hilde Lyding

Vice Manager

Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Scientific Advisory Board

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