Language Technologies and CALL

Maxine Eskenazi

Maxine Eskenazi Maxine S. Eskenazi received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Languages from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973. She received her DEA (Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies - equiv. Masters) in Linguistics from the University of Paris VII in 1981 and her Doctorat de Troisieme Cycle in Computer Science from the University of Paris XI in 1984. Her thesis was on "Caracterisation acoustique des voyelles francaises en vue de leur reconnaissance automatique" and her thesis advisor was Jean-Sylvain Lienard. She has been President and Chief Technical Officer of the Carnegie Speech™ Company (2001 - ). Carnegie Speech™ is a CMU spinoff. She is presently Associate Teaching Professor in the Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. From 1980 to 1994 she worked as a grad student and then a tenured researcher at LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay, France.

Addresses: www mail

Date

• 14:00, Thursday, June 25^th, 2009
• Room VA2, building of Civil Engineering, IST-Alameda

Speaker

• Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abstract

Language Technologies are still in their early stages of use as far as Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) is concerned. But some notable progress has been made and some systems have appeared. This talk will discuss three applications that I have developed: NativeAccent, Let's Go Lexical Entrainment, and REAP. We will look at how each one uses language technologies. We will also discuss the challenges that each system overcomes when it combines the need to serve the language learner well with the present state of each technology. We will also examine the learning science questions that are raised when the interface between the technology and the student is created.