FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT and CALL for PARTICIPATION The 11th ELSNET Summer School on Language and Speech Communication Topic: Language and Speech Technology in Language Learning Lille (France), Monday July 7 - Friday July 18, 2003 Organized by the University of Lille 3 We are happy to announce that registration for the 11th ELSNET Summer School is now open. For this school we have chosen a topic of great relevance to researchers and developers in Europe and in other multilingual environments: the use of language and speech technology in language learning, both of spoken and of written language. The goal of this workshop is to get young researchers on a track that will eventually contribute to an important application area. The underlying vision (or dream) is The automatic animated language tutor. + Audience and aims: We see the school as mainly research and development oriented, and hence the primary audience are researchers, developers and integrators who will make our vision happen (rather than teachers who would use it). Both technological and pedagogical aspects will be taken into consideration The aims are: * to make the students familiar with the main principles and problems of language learning/teaching * to make them familiar with current best practice in computer assisted language learning * to make them familiar with the main challenges in computer assisted language learning Participants are expected to have a general computational background and some familiarity with language or speech research and/or processing. After completion of the summer school participants should be able to function in teams aimed at designing or implementing tools, environments or courses for Computer Assisted Language Learning (abbreviated CALL). + Course programme: The provisonal programme is available at http://www.elsnet.org/ess2003/schedule.html The 2-weeks programme comprises the following courses: * Introduction to CALL (Teacher: Jozef Colpaert, [Univ of Antwerp]) * Introduction to natural language processing for CALL (Teacher: Wolfgang Menzel [Univ of Hamburg], to be confirmed) * Introduction to speech processing for CALL (Teacher: Philippe Delcloque [MSEC Manchester]) * Using NLP tools in CALL (hands-on) (Teacher: Wolfgang Menzel [Univ of Hamburg], to be confirmed) * Using Speech tools in CALL (hands-on) (Teacher: Michael McTear [Univ of Ulster]) * CALL design and interfaces (Teacher: Philippe Delcloque [MSEC Manchester]) * Grammatical and morphological error diagnosis (Teacher: Lars Borin [Univ of Gothenburg]) * Systems for pronunciation training (Teacher: Anne-Marie Oster [KTH Stockholm]) * Building a grammatical CALL system (hands-on) (Teacher: Lars Borin [Univ of Gothenburg]) * Building a speech CALL system (hands-on) (Teacher: Michael McTear [Univ of Ulster]) All students attend the same full programme, except for the hands-on sessions, where students can sign up for either NLP or Speech oriented streams. In special student sessions students can present their own work. The presentations will be published on the ELSNET website. Please note that the number of places for this summer school is limited and that early registration is recommended. The working language of the Summer School will be English. + Fees: Category Registration fee (euro) Students 125 Academic staff 250 Commercial organisations 500 ELSNET members are entitled to a 20% discount + Food and accommodation: The cost of accommodation (on campus) will be 30 euro per night. Meals will be free. Registration, grants and other information: For detailed information about registration procedures and deadlines, fees, accommodation, grant possibilities, venue, course and social programme, etc visit the ESS2003 website at http://www.univ-lille3.fr/ESS2003 [to be opened soon] or send an email to the local organizers at elsnetadmin@univ-lille3.fr A limited number of grants (covering the cost of accommodation) may be available for citizens of EU and associated countries. Details and application forms will be published on the website. For information about the programme visit the provisional ESS2003 website at http://www.elsnet.org/ess2003 or contact the chair of the programme committee, Steven Krauwer (steven.krauwer@elsnet.org)