Palestra - Prof. Maxine Eskenazi

23 junho 2009, 07:55 • Isabel Maria Martins Trancoso

Language Technologies and CALL

14:00, Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Room VA2, building of Civil Engineering, IST-Alameda

Speaker

Maxine Eskenazi, Carnegie Mellon University, USA



Abstract

Language Technologies are still in their early stages of use as far as 

Computer-assisted Language Learning (CALL) is concerned. But some 

notable progress has been made and some systems have appeared. This 

talk will discuss three applications that I have developed: 

NativeAccent, Let's Go Lexical Entrainment, and REAP. We will look at 

how each one uses language technologies. We will also discuss the 

challenges that each system overcomes when it combines the need to 

serve the language learner well with the present state of each 

technology. We will also examine the learning science questions that 

are raised when the interface between the technology and the student 

is created.



Bio

Maxine S. Eskenazi received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern 

Languages from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973. She received her 

DEA (Diplome d'Etudes Approfondies - equiv. Masters) in Linguistics 

from the University of Paris VII in 1981 and her Doctorat de Troisieme 

Cycle in Computer Science from the University of Paris XI in 1984. Her 

thesis was on "Caracterisation acoustique des voyelles francaises en 

vue de leur reconnaissance automatique" and her thesis advisor was 

Jean-Sylvain Lienard. She has been President and Chief Technical 

Officer of the Carnegie Speech™ Company (2001 - ). Carnegie Speech™ is 

a CMU spinoff. She is presently Associate Teaching Professor in the 

Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science of 

Carnegie Mellon University. From 1980 to 1994 she worked as a grad 

student and then a tenured researcher at LIMSI-CNRS in Orsay, France.