SWIM: A “Natural” Interface for the scientifically minded language learner

Abstract

We describe a system under development, whose goal is to provide a “natural” environment for students learning to produce sentences in French. The learning objective is personal pronouns, the method is inductive (learning through exploration). Input of the learning component are conceptual structures (meanings) and the corresponding linguistic forms (sentences), its outputs are rules characterizing these data. The learning is dialogue based, that is to say, the student may ask certain kinds of questions such as:How does one say 〈idea〉?,Can one say 〈linguistic form〉?,Why does one say 〈linguistic form〉?, and the system answers them.

By integrating the student into the process, that is, by encouraging him to build and explore a search space we hope to enhance not only his learning efficiency (what and how to learn), but also our understanding of the underlying processes. By analyzing the trace of the dialogue (what questions have been asked at what moment), we may infer the strategies a student put to use.

Although the system covers far more than what is discussed here, we will restrict our discussion to a small subset of grammar, personal pronouns, which are known to be a notorious problem both in first and second language learning.