Contrary to most current practice and contrary to the explicit
comments of some practioners, natural language processing (NLP) has
essential contributions to make to computer-assisted language learning
(CALL).  This paper reports on GLOSSER, an intelligent assistant for
vocabulary learning in French, which has been fully implemented and
tested.  It offers assistance for 30,000 words taken from any
text (no special preparation required). The assistance takes the form
of (i) information on the grammatical signifiance of morphology; (ii)
entries in a bilingual dictionary; and (iii) examples of word use
taken from nearly one million words of text (including some bilingual
text).  The application has received a warm welcome in user studies,
and it relies essentially on lemmatization, part-of-speech (POS)
disambiguation, lexeme indexing, and bilingual text alignment---all
elements of NLP technology.