This open access volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th biennial conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, GSCL 2017, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2017, which focused on language technologies for the digital age. The 16 full papers and 10 short papers included in the proceedings were carefully selected from 36 submissions. Topics covered include text processing of the German language, online media and online content, semantics and reasoning, sentiment analysis, and semantic web description languages.

This book pinpoints the impact of new technologies on language and communication, highlights the evolution and changes undergone by humanities in conjunction with technological innovation, and looks at how language has adapted to the challenges of today’s digitized world.

This white paper is part of a series that promotes knowledge about language technology and its potential. It addresses educators, journalists, politicians, language communities and others. The availability and use of language technology in Europe varies between languages. Consequently, the actions that are required to further support research and development of language technologies also differ for each language. The required actions depend on many factors, such as the complexity of a given language and the size of its community. META-NET, a Network of Excellence funded by the European Commission, has conducted an analysis of current language resources and technologies. This analysis focused on the 23 official European languages as well as other important national and regional languages in Europe. The results of this analysis suggest that there are many significant research gaps for each language. A more detailed expert analysis and assessment of the current situation will help maximise the impact of additional research and minimize any risks. META-NET consists of 54 research centres from 33 countries that are working with stakeholders from commercial businesses, government agencies, industry, research organisations, software companies, technology providers and European universities. Together, they are creating a common technology vision while developing a strategic research agenda that shows how language technology applications can address any research gaps by 2020.

The digital age is changing our children’s lives and childhood dramatically. New technologies transform the way people interact with each other, the way stories are shared and distributed, and the way reality is presented and perceived. Parents experience that toddlers can handle tablets and apps with a level of sophistication the children’s grandparents can only envy. The question of how the ecology of the child affects the acquisition of competencies and skills has been approached from different angles in different disciplines. In linguistics, psychology and neuroscience, the central question addressed concerns the specific role of exposure to language. Two influential types of theory have been proposed. On one view the capacity to learn language is hard-wired in the human brain: linguistic input is merely a trigger for language to develop. On an alternative view, language acquisition depends on the linguistic environment of the child, and specifically on language input provided through child-adult communication and interaction. The latter view further specifies that factors in situated interaction are crucial for language learning to take place. In the fields of information technology, artificial intelligence and robotics a current theme is to create robots that develop, as children do, and to establish how embodiment and interaction support language learning in these machines. In the field of human-machine interaction, research is investigating whether using a physical robot, rather than a virtual agent or a computer-based video, has a positive effect on language development. The Research Topic will address the following issues: - What are the methodological challenges faced by research on language acquisition in the digital age? - How should traditional theories and models of language acquisition be revised to account for the multimodal and multichannel nature of language learning in the digital age? - How should existing and future technologies be developed and transformed so as to be most beneficial for child language learning and cognition? - Can new technologies be tailored to support child growth, and most importantly, can they be designed in order to enhance specifically vulnerable children’s language learning environment and opportunities? - What kind of learning mechanisms are involved? - How can artificial intelligence and robotics technologies, as robot tutors, support language development? These questions and issues can only be addressed by means of an interdisciplinary approach that aims at developing new methods of data collection and analysis in cross-sectional and longitudinal perspectives. We welcome contributions addressing these questions from an interdisciplinary perspective both theoretically and empirically.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7h Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2015, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2015. The 31 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Speech Processing; Multiword Expressions; Parsing; Language Resources and Tools; Ontologies and Wordnets; Machine Translation; Information and Data Extraction; Text Engineering and Processing; Applications in Language Learning; Emotions, Decisions and Opinions; Less-Resourced Languages.

This book illustrates the developments of task-based language teaching (TBLT) approaches in relation to the evolution of digital technologies. It highlights how technology-mediated TBLT principles can support English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning and contribute to understanding new classroom dynamics. Drawing from the key theoretical concepts of TBLT, the author discusses the integration of tasks and technologies from a secondary education perspective, which is often under-represented in the TBLT literature. Morgana looks at how the EFL secondary classroom has been recently re-conceptualised as a social place whose boundaries go far behind the traditional school settings. This book provides theoretical approaches and classroom implementation practices by presenting four case studies on the different L2 skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking). The volume is organised into two main sections. The first section focuses on the theoretical approaches to TBLT and highlights the key concepts behind this methodology. This section also looks at the recent development of a technology-mediated TBLT framework and its implementations in various EFL educational contexts. The second section presents four case studies of secondary-school EFL learners in Italy. Each case study focuses on a different language skill, providing examples of classroom practices in both blended and online learning settings. Pedagogical recommendations for teachers are provided at the end of each case study. The book adopts a multimodal approach and aims at providing scholars in applied linguistics and TBLT practitioners with theories and implementation practices to understand the ways technologies are shaping tasks and mediating students' learning processes.