BYU students share language learning research at the 2023 EUROCALL Conference.
Iceland: home of beautiful waterfalls, black sand beaches, and this year's annual conference of the European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL for short.) At the EUROCALL Conference in Reykjavik on August 15–18, BYU students Tyler Ivie (Linguistics ’25), Peter Williams (Linguistics ’24), and Evan Bartholomeusz (Neuroscience ’24) each presented important digital humanities research that represented months of hard work.
The conference took place at the University of Iceland and brought in researchers from the United States, Canada, Europe, Japan, and more. Of all the participants, the BYU students constituted three of only four undergraduates to present this year. Bartholomeusz says, “Getting the badge and checking in on the first day and realizing how amazing it is that BYU offers this opportunity to undergrads . . . was really, really cool.”
For his research project, Bartholomeusz expanded access to an existing language search engine that can sort web results by grammar topic and recognize different grammar components in online texts. He contributed by developing a Persian module for the search engine. Persian currently qualifies as a low-resource language, since it has limited digital data and content for use in machine learning or other processing.
After watching Bartholomeusz’s presentation at the EUROCALL Conference, a professor from San Diego State University approached him and asked to share his work with the military language learning program in San Diego. A conference attendee from Iran also expressed enthusiasm for the presentation, and Bartholomeusz says, “We talked for a while about his feelings about Persian as a native speaker and how excited he was to finally have a resource that allowed more accessibility to the language.”
Ivie and Williams applied machine learning approaches to readability assessment of arbitrary texts in Japanese and Czech, respectively. They extracted linguistic features from Japanese and Czech texts at different reading levels and then used those features to train classifiers to automatically label an unseen text with a specific reading level. Their work helps language instructors find suitable class material for their students.
Williams, who focused on Czech (another low-resource language), says that his work also “gives valuable insight into how well certain features perform on a typologically different language from most others which have been studied in this field.” Having learned Czech on his mission, he loves seeing the development of a tool that can increase opportunities for those who speak and teach the language.
The students accomplished their work with the help of Associate Research Professor Rob Reynolds (Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning), who accompanied them on their trip to Iceland after mentoring their research in a seminar course during the 2023 winter semester. Ivie, Williams, and Bartholomeusz originally took a text processing course from Reynolds, after which they enrolled in the seminar course to engage in independent research related to the skills that they had previously learned with him.
Reynolds had the idea to submit his students’ work to the international EUROCALL Conference. They submitted applications at the beginning of the summer, and once EUROCALL accepted those applications, they worked through the rest of the summer to finish researching and preparing for the conference presentations. Reynolds says, “They chose their topics that they wanted to do . . . it just happened that all three of them chose a computer assisted language learning project. They drove almost everything. I was really impressed with them . . . it's just exciting to see their growth.”
After the culmination of the research projects at the EUROCALL Conference, Reynolds and his students spent time sightseeing around Iceland. They hiked trails surrounded by waterfalls, visited stunning landscapes around the country, and witnessed Icelandic Pride events taking place that week. For Ivie, Williams, and Bartholomeusz, the value of the trip emerged from both the opportunity to explore Iceland and the benefits of participating in a prestigious conference.
Ivie says, “I am incredibly grateful for the confidence and résumé boost that I received by being able to present research at an international conference. The College of Humanities truly provided means for me to receive incredible feedback and credibility for future academic endeavors.”
Learn more about EUROCALL here.
