Following on from the English Profile programme, Cambridge English Language Assessment will fund a new institute to undertake research on Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA), to be launched in October 2013. The institute will be administered by the Computer Laboratory but includes principal investigators from the Department of Engineering and the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. The initial period of funding is for 5 years, beginning in October 2013. However, the ALTA institute is intended to be a rolling research programme with funding renewed for a further 5 years towards the end of the current period.
The remit of the institute is to conduct research in computer systems and platforms, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, speech processing and machine learning, relevant to the application of technology in language learning and language assessment.
The initial team of principal investigators consists of
- Ted Briscoe (Director), Computational linguistics
- Paula Buttery, Corpus linguistics
- Mark Gales, Speech processing
- Zoubin Ghahramani, Machine learning
- Andy Rice, Systems and platforms