We present a cross-linguistic study in which the open source C-LARA platform was used to evaluate GPT-4’s ability to perform several key tasks relevant to Computer Assisted Language Learning. For each of the languages English, Farsi, Faroese, Mandarin and Russian, we instructed GPT-4, through C-LARA, to write six different texts, using prompts chosen to obtain texts of widely differing character. We then further instructed GPT-4 to annotate each text with segmentation markup, glosses and lemma/part-of-speech information; native speakers hand-corrected the texts and annotations to obtain error rates on the different component tasks. The C-LARA platform makes it easy to combine the results into a single multimodal document, further facilitating checking of their correctness. GPT-4’s performance varied widely across languages and processing tasks, but performance on different text genres was roughly comparable. In some cases, most notably glossing of English text, we found that GPT-4 was consistently able to revise its annotations to improve them.

We describe recent extensions to the open source Learning And Reading Assistant (LARA) supporting image-based and phonetically annotated texts. We motivate the utility of these extensions both in general and specifically in relation to endangered and archaic languages, and illustrate with examples from the revived Australian language Barngarla, Icelandic Sign Language, Irish Gaelic, Old Norse manuscripts and Egyptian hieroglyphics.