Learning Translation Skills With a Knowledge-Based Tutor: French-Italian Conjunctions in Context

LEARNING TRANSLATION SKILLS WITH A KNOWLEDGE-BASED TUTOR: FRENCH-ITALIAN CONJUNCTIONS IN CONTEXT Stefano A. Cerri Dipartimento di Infomnatica, Universit~ di Pisa 56100 Pisa, Italy Marie-France Merger Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Romanze, Universit~ di Pisa 56100 Pisa, Italy ABSTRACT This pape~ describes an "intelligent" tutor of foreign language concepts and skills based upon state-of-the-art research in Intelligent reaching Systems and Computational Linguistics. The tutor is part of a large R&D project in ITS which resulted in a system (called DART~ for the de- sign and development of intelligent teaching dialo- gues on PLATO I and in a program (called ELISA~ for teaching foreign language conjunctions in con- text. ELISA was able to teach a few conjunctions in English, Dutch and Italian. The research reported here extends ELISA to a complete set of conjunctions in Italian and French. I. INTRODUCTION In the framework of a large research and deve- lopment project - called DART - concerned with the construction of an environment for the design of large scale Intelligent Teaching Systems (ITS~, a prototype ITS - called ELISA - was developed which teaches words (conjunctions~ of a foreign language in context (Cerri & Breuker, 1980, 1981; Breuker & Cerri, 1982~. The DART system is an authoring environment based on the formalism of ATNs for the representa- tion of the procedural part of the teaching dialogue and on Semantic Networks for the representation of the conceptual and linguistic structures. The main achievement of DART was the integration of tradi- tional Computer Assisted Learning (CAL~ facilities - such as the ones available in the PLATO system - in an Artificial Intelligence framework, thus offer- ........ • The DART system on PLATO is the result of a joint effort of the University of Pisa (I~ and the Uni- versity of Amsterdam (NL~ and its property rights are reserved. It can be distributed for experimen- tation and research. This work was ;artially financed by a grant of the GRIS group of the Italian National Research Council. ing authors a friendly environment for a smooth CAL - ITS transition when they design and develop tea- ching programs. ELISA was a testbed of the ideas underlying the DART project and at the same time a simple, but operational, "intelligent" foreign language teacher acting on a small subset of English, Dutch and Ita- lian conjunctions. The sample dialogues of ELISA were chosen intentionally to exemplify, in the clearest way, issues such as the diagnostic of mis- conceptions in the use of foreign language conjunc- tions, which were addressed by the research. In particular, the assumption was made that a very simple representation of the correct knowledge needed for using f.l. conjunctions in context would have been sufficient to model the whole subject matter as well as the incorrect behaviour of the student. Owing to its prototypical and experimental character, ELISA was not ready for concrete, large scale experimentation on any pair of the languages mentioned. The research described in this report has been carried out with the concrete goal …

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