Introducing the European NETwork for COmbining Language LEarning and Crowdsourcing Techniques (enetCollect)

Abstract

We present enetCollect, a large European network project funded as a COST Action, that sets ground for combining crowdsourcing with IT technologies used in areas such as language learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project tackles a major challenge of bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to foster language learning of all European citizens from diverse socio-demographic, cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds. It aims at unlocking a crowdsourcing potential available for all languages, including less widely spoken languages, in order to create language resources and achieve a coverage of material for teaching the languages. It will meet its research and capacity-building goals by creating an international community of researchers that will work on producing a comprehensive theoretical framework and running prototypical experiments to benefit a wide range of users and languages, while considering ethical, legal and business issues. This article informs about its objectives, expected impact and strategic organisation that contribute to reaching its flexible and sustainable success goals.