In July, we warmly welcomed a new person to Linguineo. *Drum roll* None other than Kobe, who completed a 5-week internship in Linguineo’s small but cozy team. Kobe is pursuing a master’s degree in Linguistics at the Catholic University of Louvain, focusing on Natural Language Processing. As the final week of his internship wraps up, we interviewed him to hear about his experience at Linguineo.
Why did he want to intern with us?
“I first learned about Linguineo from Serge Bibauw, my master’s paper supervisor. His research focuses on teaching French as a foreign language and the use of chatbots in language education. Given Linguineo’s unique role in this field, he has collaborated with them before to test how chatbots affect students’ language proficiency. It’s fascinating how such collaborations benefit both companies in refining their technology and researchers in advancing scientific understanding of education.”
Big shoutout to Serge Bibauw!
What did Kobe do at Linguineo?
“As a language learning enthusiast myself, I’m deeply interested in the role of feedback in language education. Chatbots, like Linguineo’s Language Hero, open up new possibilities for giving students personalized feedback on their mistakes.”
- Kobe evaluated feedback provided by Linguineo’s educational game Language Hero to suggest improvements for the system.
- He worked on designing prompts for generative AI models to optimize the responses.
- He got to playtest a new release of Language Hero
- He also created a taxonomy for grammar corrections, and he even successfully addressed two specific issues!
French teachers, please close your eyes to the following sentence. *Slightly smiling face* One observation was that phrases like “Parles-vous de tes parents?” were not effectively corrected yet by the current generative system, possibly because vous/tu are nearly identical for such models.
Additionally, sentences containing “est-ce que” with an error were consistently transformed into the inverted form. Together with Kobe, we found solutions to address these issues. If you can’t get enough of this topic make sure to read our post on the grammar correction system right here.
What did we think about Kobe?
Kobe was very thorough in his analyses, and he also had a very good attitude. We as Linguineo really benefited from his internship.
– Steffen
What was Kobe’s biggest challenge?
Kobe’s biggest challenge during the internship, was working partially from home, where he finds it difficult to get into the working mood. Luckily, getting in the working mood at De Hoorn or in our office is easy peasy! Coffee, anyone?
What was his favorite moment?
“My favorite part of the internship was pinpointing errors that had not yet been corrected by the feedback system and envisioning possible solutions for these problems.”
And that concludes Kobe’s great 5-week internship at Linguineo. We truly had a great time working with Kobe and his contributions were very valuable. The skills he acquired during his internship will definitely benefit his future career. We wish him the best of luck!
Ps: If you are completely convinced by Kobe’s experience, come and join us for your internship!