In qualitative projects on ICALL (Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning); research and development always go hand in hand: development both depends upon the research results and dictates the research agenda. Likewise; in the development of the Swedish ICALL platform Lärka; the practical issues of development have dictated its research agenda. With NLP approaches; sooner or later; the necessity for reliable training data becomes unavoidable. At the moment Lärka’s research agenda cannot be addressed without access to reliable training data; so-called “gold standard”. This paper gives an overview of the current state of the Swedish ICALL platform development and related research agenda; and describes the first attempts to collect the reference corpus (“gold standard”) coming from course books used in CEFR-based language teaching.
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