Menu Close

Jessica Zipf

Graduate Student — PhD

I’m a Ph.D. student in linguistics at the University of Konstanz, Germany. In my Ph.D. project, I develop a Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) tool for Italian. For that, I am implementing a Grammar of Italian, using the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), that integrates a Finite-State Lexicon. Currently, I am working on a conjugation trainer for Italian verb morphology using said Finite-State transducer to create a large verb database. This project is a joint effort with Mariana Shimabukuro under the supervision of Christopher Collins and part of a research visit here at Ontario Tech.
Apart from Grammar Engineering and CALL, I am also interested in theoretical issues of Italian. These include second and/or foreign language learning, question formation and the interaction between the structure of questions and their information structural content.

Contact

If you would like to contact me, please email me at Jessica.Zipf@uni-konstanz.de.

Publications

  • M. Shimabukuro, J. Zipf, M. El-Assady, and C. Collins, “H-Matrix: Hierarchical Matrix for Visual Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Features in Large Learner Corpora,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (short papers), 2019.

    PDF

    @InProceedings{shi2019a,
    author = {Mariana Shimabukuro and Jessica Zipf and Mennatallah El-Assady and Christopher Collins},
    title = {H-Matrix: Hierarchical Matrix for Visual Analysis of Cross-Linguistic Features in Large Learner Corpora},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Information Visualization (short papers)},
    year = 2019
    }

  • M. Shimabukuro, J. Zipf, S. Yama, and C. Collins. 2023. “Evaluating Classroom Potential for Card-it: Digital Flashcards for Studying and Learning Italian Morphology,” in Proc. of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023), pages 130–136, Toronto, Canada. ACL.

    PDF 
    @inproceedings{shimabukuro-etal-2023-evaluating,
    title = "Evaluating Classroom Potential for Card-it: Digital {F}lashcards for Studying and Learning {I}talian Morphology",
    author = "Shimabukuro, Mariana  and
      Zipf, Jessica  and
      Yama, Shawn  and
      Collins, Christopher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.11",
    pages = "130--136",
    abstract = "This paper presents Card-it, a web-based application for learning Italian verb conjugation. Card-it integrates a large-scale finite-state morphological{\textasciitilde}(FSM) analyzer and a flashcard application as a user-friendly way for learners to utilize the analyzer. While Card-it can be used by individual learners, to support classroom adoption, we implemented simple classroom management functionalities such as sharing flashcards to a class and tracking students{'} progression. We evaluated Card-it with teachers of Italian. Card-it was reported as engaging and supportive, especially by featuring two different quiz types combined with a verb form look-up feature. Teachers were optimistic about the potential of Card-it as a classroom supplementary tool for learners of Italian as L2. Future work includes sample sentences and a complete learners evaluation.",
}

vialab Team

vialab Alumni