Christopher Collins


2025

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LangEye: Toward ‘Anytime’ Learner-Driven Vocabulary Learning From Real-World Objects
Mariana Shimabukuro | Deval Panchal | Christopher Collins
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)

We present LangEye, a mobile application for contextual vocabulary learning that combines learner-curated content with generative NLP. Learners use their smartphone camera to capture real-world objects and create personalized “memories” enriched with definitions, example sentences, and pronunciations generated via object recognition, large language models, and machine translation.LangEye features a three-phase review system — progressing from picture recognition to sentence completion and free recall. In a one-week exploratory study with 20 French (L2) learners, the learner-curated group reported higher engagement and motivation than those using pre-curated materials. Participants valued the app’s personalization and contextual relevance. This study highlights the potential of integrating generative NLP with situated, learner-driven interaction. We identify design opportunities for adaptive review difficulty, improved content generation, and better support for language-specific features. LangEye points toward scalable, personalized vocabulary learning grounded in real-world contexts.

2023

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Evaluating Classroom Potential for Card-it: Digital Flashcards for Studying and Learning Italian Morphology
Mariana Shimabukuro | Jessica Zipf | Shawn Yama | Christopher Collins
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)

This paper presents Card-it, a web-based application for learning Italian verb conjugation. Card-it integrates a large-scale finite-state morphological~(FSM) analyzer and a flashcard application as a user-friendly way for learners to utilize the analyzer. While Card-it can be used by individual learners, to support classroom adoption, we implemented simple classroom management functionalities such as sharing flashcards to a class and tracking students’ progression. We evaluated Card-it with teachers of Italian. Card-it was reported as engaging and supportive, especially by featuring two different quiz types combined with a verb form look-up feature. Teachers were optimistic about the potential of Card-it as a classroom supplementary tool for learners of Italian as L2. Future work includes sample sentences and a complete learners evaluation.

2008

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Interactive Visualization for Computational Linguistics
Christopher Collins | Gerald Penn | Sheelagh Carpendale
Tutorial Abstracts of ACL-08: HLT

2004

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Head-Driven Parsing for Word Lattices
Christopher Collins | Bob Carpenter | Gerald Penn
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-04)