Natural Language Processing in Computer-Assisted Language Learning

This article examines the application of natural language processing to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) including the history of work in this field over the last thirtyfive years and focuses on current developments and opportunities. It always refers to programs designed to help people learn foreign languages. CALL is a large field — much larger than computational linguistics. This article outlines the areas of CALL to which computational linguistics (CL) can be applied. CL programs process natural languages such as English and Spanish, and the techniques are therefore often referred to as natural language processing (NLP). NLP is enlisted in several ways in CALL to provide lemmatized access to corpora for advanced learners seeking subtleties unavailable in grammars and dictionaries. It also provides morphological analysis and subsequent dictionary access for words unknown to readers and to parse user input and diagnose morphological and syntactic errors.