Automatic Assessment of Child Language and Adult L2 Acquisition with Neural Language Models, a Distinguished Computational Linguistics Lecture

Dr. Kenji Sagae (Professor and Chair of Linguistics, UC Davis) will give a talk titled "Automatic Assessment of Child Language and Adult L2 Acquisition with Neural Language Models"

When assessing language development, one typically faces a choice between easily computable but coarse-grained metrics focused on superficial characteristics that are broadly applicable to a variety of languages, or more expressive metrics tailored specifically to the grammar of a target language. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss recent work on automatic assessment of language development that uses small lightweight neural language models, and produces results that are comparable to what is achieved using established language assessment metrics based on language-specific information carefully designed by experts. Unlike existing sophisticated metrics, this approach is fully data-driven and can be applied in the same way to different languages without the need for linguistic expertise. I will present an evaluation scheme that makes it possible to compare this approach directly to previously proposed metrics. Training and evaluation of the language models used in this approach is made possible by the availability of longitudinal child language data in the CHILDES database. In the second part of this talk, I will discuss the application of this general assessment approach to adults learning a new language, including a long-term project on development of a dataset suitable for training and evaluation of models related to language learning in a university setting.

Please submit interpreting requests to myAccess.rit.edu.

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