Erin Gustafson


2018

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Second Language Acquisition Modeling
Burr Settles | Chris Brust | Erin Gustafson | Masato Hagiwara | Nitin Madnani
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

We present the task of second language acquisition (SLA) modeling. Given a history of errors made by learners of a second language, the task is to predict errors that they are likely to make at arbitrary points in the future. We describe a large corpus of more than 7M words produced by more than 6k learners of English, Spanish, and French using Duolingo, a popular online language-learning app. Then we report on the results of a shared task challenge aimed studying the SLA task via this corpus, which attracted 15 teams and synthesized work from various fields including cognitive science, linguistics, and machine learning.