I'm a Useful NLP Tool--Get Me out of Here

Irish is a compulsory subject in Irish schools. However, there are several pedagogical issues with teaching and learning the language. Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is under-utilised in schools in Ireland and even more so in the case of Irish, as there are very few CALL resources for the language. This paper looks at the lessons learnt from other Natural Language Processing (NLP)/CALL projects, and tries to apply them to build Intelligent CALL (ICALL) resources for Irish. It shows that a focus on the learner needs and smart use of existing resources can produce useful NLP/CALL resources for language learners. Close collaboration between NLP specialists, CALL researchers, linguists, pedagogical specialists and learners is important in order for a project of this type to be successful. Abair is a useful text-to-speech (TTS) synthesiser for Irish that is relatively unknown outside the TTS/Irish language community. This is a pity as it is a high-quality NLP resource with potential to enhance CALL resources. This paper reports on the integration of Abair into a CALL resource for Irish orthography and pronunciation. While it was developed specifically for Irish, the system is modular in design, and could be adopted for other languages. Furthermore, the lessons learnt are applicable to other languages, not just Irish. [For full proceedings, see ED564162.]