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EnetCollect Newsletter - August 2020
Dear enetCollect members,
We hope this email finds you and your families well.
It is around half a year now, since many of us last met at the Working Group meetings in Sliema, Trnava and Coimbra late 2019 or the 2nd Crowdfest in early 2020, and since then the situation
has unfolded other than expected.
As you know, the pandemic affected enetCollect activities and planning. The 4th Annual Meeting, scheduled in March 2020 in Naples had to be cancelled, as well as several STSM stays and
conference participations planned during springtime.
Nonetheless, several travel-independent enetCollect activities have moved forward with success, others were resumed from standby, and we are approaching the next milestones for enetCollect.
Said this, with this newsletter we would like to give you information on enetCollect’s current state, outputs and planning, and particularly highlight relevant opportunities for your participation.
Read on to learn about:
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Status of Grant Period 4
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Ongoing activities and outputs
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Plans in progress
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Dissemination
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Interesting pointers
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Give a hand !
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Statistics
Please let us know, if you have any further news to share.
Looking forward to read your feedback!
Yours Chairs@enetCollect
Status of Grant Period 4
Work and Budget Plan
The Work and Budget Plan for the 4th grant year has been validated and the grant period started on 1st of May as usual, and is ending on the 6th of March 2021. However,
the possibility of an extension of up to 6 months is evaluated by the COST administration and is considered as quite likely. We should receive further official information on this towards autumn time.
Networking activities
Meanwhile we wait for news regarding a possible extension, enetCollect has its ordinary GP4 budget to fund:
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about 15 STSMs,
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working group meetings, Crowdfest, Annual meeting,
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2 dissemination meetings and 3 ITC conference grants,
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Video recording and publishing services,
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online communication tools for virtual events.
Timeline
Calls for Short Term Scientific Missions will be retaken at the beginning of August. Depending on how the situation with the pandemic evolves, we hope that first travels for STSMs and conferences
will be possible towards autumn. The meeting planning will possibly be restarted towards the end of the year -- considering both physical/hybrid and online-only events.
Meanwhile, we are working on launching relevant online activities, starting with a regular enetCollect Webinar (see below).
We already know that there will be quite a number of announcements in September, so make sure to follow updates about calls and upcoming events on enetCollect’s mailing lists (link)
or on the news page (link) !!
Updated reimbursement rules for meetings
COST has revised its reimbursement rules for meeting participations. The major change is that meals and local transport costs are now included into an overall daily allowance, which should make accounting
easier for all sides. You can read the details in the latest version of the COST Vademcum (link)
and we have also updated the summary of reimbursement rules on the enetCollect Webpages (link).
Check out the changes if you get a chance!
Ongoing activities and outputs
EnetCollect initiatives
Despite the lock-down, many joint initiatives among enetCollect members are actively moving forward in remote cooperation. These initiatives were partly started at the Crowdfest 1+2 and during hands-on
sessions of Working Group meetings, or were born out of existing synergies among members’ interests and objectives.
Here is an excerpt of the initiatives we are currently aware of.
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Corpus cleaning through crowdsourcing, coordinated by Tanara Zingano Kuhn.
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V-TREL vocabulary training and crowdsourcing application, coordinated by Verena Lyding and Christos Rodosthenous.
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Synonymalta, game-based multi word expression trainer, coordinated by Federico Sangati and Ji-Ung Lee.
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Survey on language learning platforms, coordinated by Lionel Nicolas.
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L2 learner survey, coordinated by
Çiler Hatipoğlu, Elżbieta Gajek, Lina Milosevska and Nihada Delibegović Džanić.
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MWExpress crowdsourcing application for multi word expressions, coordinated by Gülsen Erygit.
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LARA application, coordinated by Manny Rayner and Branislav Bédi.
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Katana and Grand Guru, coordinated by Alice Millour and Karën Fort.
Some of these initiatives have led to the creation of the working prototypes that you can consult on the dedicated page of the website (link).
If you like to get additional information on the projects just get in touch with the coordinators or us at
chair.en...@eurac.edu.
EnetCollect-related projects and applications
So far, five funded projects are pursued by enetCollect members. You can find more information about them on the dedicated page of the website (link).
We recently received the great news that a WG5-related Horizon project proposed by Alain Couillaut was funded. More information can be found in the
announcement made on the general mailing list (link).
In addition, we are pleased to announce that in November 2020 Lavinia Aparaschivei will start a PhD project on “Combining language
learning and implicit crowdsourcing to improve Italian and South Tyrolean German Language Resources” in cooperation between University of Bologna and Eurac Research.
Plans in progress
A regular enetCollect Webinar
To keep in touch as a larger community, we want to launch an enetCollect Webinar with featured presentations on a variety of topics of interest for
the wider audience. This way we would like to create an opportunity to come together regularly, learn new things and discuss about them.
Currently, we are finalizing the HOW & WHEN. Please help us selecting the most suitable modality by filling the dedicated survey (link).
You can also consult the dedicated mail, recently sent on the enetCollect-all mailing list (link).
Also, if you have ideas for topics or would like to be included with a presentation, drop us a line at
chair.en...@eurac.edu.
Launch of an enetCollect journal series
To create a stable forum for enetCollect-related publications, we aim at establishing a journal series on “Combining Language Learning and Crowdsourcing”. We are currently reaching out to potential
online publishers with the aim to get the series started towards the end of this grant year. Updates on the status of the series creation will follow on the enetCollect-all mailing list (link).
If you have any suggestions for relevant publishing options, please let us know at
chair.en...@eurac.edu.
Information sessions about STSMs and more
Coming soon, virtual information sessions will be offered to communicate experiences and provide tips and tricks for making the most out of STSM stays. Depending on the response to these information
sessions, information sessions on more topics, like writing blog posts or preparing joint initiatives like a crowdfest task can be organized.
If you have ideas for other relevant information sessions, let us know.
Dissemination
EnetCollect Blog
Since December 2019, enetCollect’s dissemination group has started a BLOG on the Website. It is populated by enetCollect members with reports on STSM stays, conference presentations and information
on the research groups of enetCollect members. Have a look at the interesting posts (link)!
If you are up for writing your own blog post, please get in touch with
blog.ene...@eurac.edu.
Dedicated dissemination pages for each WG
Next to the general dissemination page (link),
we have recently established separate dissemination pages for each Working Group, which give access to references for articles and presentations made by enetCollect members.
Have a look to know about your fellow WG-members latest results and let us know in case we forgot to register some of your work!
WG1 dissemination page (link)
WG2 dissemination page (link)
WG3 dissemination page (link)
WG4 dissemination page (link)
WG5 dissemination page (link)
Recent publications
Here is an excerpt of the four most recent publications of our members.
The first paper discusses automatic generation of reading-comprehension questions and more specifically a new evaluation scheme to take into account the pedagogic value and appropriateness
of questions generated.
Linguistic Appropriateness and Pedagogic Usefulness of Reading Comprehension Questions. Horbach, A., Aldabe, I., Bexte, M., Lopez de Lacalle, O., & Maritxalar, M. (2020). In Proceedings
of LREC 2020, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 1753–1762). Marseille, France. (download)
The second paper discusses the implicit crowdsourcing paradigm and how multiple enetCollect members are approaching it.
Creating Expert Knowledge by Relying on Language Learners: a Generic Approach for Mass-Producing Language Resources by Combining Implicit Crowdsourcing and Language Learning. Nicolas, L.,
Lyding, V., Borg, C., Forascu, C., Fort, K., Zdravkova, K., & al (2020). In Proceedings of LREC 2020, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 268--278). Marseille, France. (download)
The third paper is a follow up paper on a recent version of the implicit crowdsourcing vocabulary trainer started during the Crowdfest 2019.
Using Crowdsourced Exercises for Vocabulary Training to Expand ConceptNet. Rodosthenous, C., Lyding, V., Sangati, F., König, A., ul Hassan, U., Nicolas, L. & al (2020). In Proceedings of
LREC 2020, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 307--316). Marseille, France. (download)
The
fourth paper is the latest paper about the LARA portal, a reading tool started
in the context of WG3.
Constructing Multimodal Language Learner Texts Using LARA: Experiences with Nine Languages. Akhlaghi, E., Bédi, B., Bektaş, F., Berthelsen, H., Butterweck, M., Chua, C. & al (2020). In
Proceedings of LREC 2020, 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (pp. 323--331). Marseille, France. (download)
Interesting pointers
COOL - CLIL Open Online Learning Project
The project is developing a web3 service for creating online language resources and is linking together different projects and
services. The project targets two user groups; teachers and learners representing transversal educational sectors with a main focus on teacher education (both in-service and college training).
Check out their webpage
here.
DuoLingo research
The research unit of Duolingo has a list of ongoing initiatives and interesting publications. We are looking forward to retake the duolingo keynote
presentation we had appointed for the 4th annual meeting.
Check out their webpage
here.
Mooc2Move initiative
Since December 2019, enetCollect’s dissemination group has started a BLOG on the Website. It is populated by enetCollect members with reports on STSM
stays, conference presentations. The project is also hosting an international conference on MOOCs, language learning and mobility
Check out their webpage
here.
Ultimate List of Language Learning Resources
We recently came across this slowly and steadily curated list of pointers for language learning tools for a large variety of languages. Do have a look
at it, we find it quite impressive
Check out the list
here.
Give a hand!
Different community efforts are regularly ongoing within enetCollect.
Be part of the crowd and provide your contribution as it fits your interests!
Crowdsourcing Language
Assessment Project (CLAP)
The CLAPing team would like to invite you to participate in a comparative
judgement task for learner texts. The aim of this project is to investigate whether crowdsourcing can offer practical solutions to the time and cost difficulties associated with proficiency assessment of learner texts for research purposes. Indeed, researchers
working with learner texts are often in the need of valid and reliable proficiency measures for the texts. However, getting a learner corpus assessed by several trained raters is extremely costly.
If you are willing to contribute you will be asked to choose the ‘best’
text between a pair of texts, ideally repeating the task to reach a min of 15 decisions.
Link:
http://clap.uclouvain.be
Deadline: 31 August 2020
L2 Learner Survey
The “L2 Learner Survey” team would like to let you know that our project aiming to uncover when, where and how foreign language learners and pre-service language teachers
with diverse cultural and language backgrounds make use of crowdsourcing websites, tools and games to learn languages continues. So far, we have completed the piloting of our questionnaire in four different countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Poland
and Turkey) and will start collecting data from the remaining countries in the enetCollect project at the beginning of the new academic year. We would be really happy and grateful if you could help us with the data collection process. You will hear from us
soon…
Statistics
The progression of enetCollect in terms of its members and WG subscriptions is monitored on a regular basis. You can see the current and past statistics on the dedicated
page of the website (link).
Here are some of the graphs on the latest numbers we crunched. As you can observe, the number of people joining enetCollect are steadily raising while the number of visitors, mails on the mailing
lists, STSMs and participation to meetings fluctuate within each year but keep on raising from one year to the next one.
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