ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING: DEVELOPMENTS AT 
ARI 
Melissa Holland 
Manger, Language Program 
U.S. Army Research Institute 
Alexandria, VA 22333-5600 
The: Program in Advanced Technologies for 
Language Learning at ARI seeks to develop and 
test foreign language tutors through contractual 
research by computational linguists and in-house 
research by ARI psychologists. The program arose 
out of a technology push to integrate NLP with 
intelligent tutoring systems, coupled with a need in 
the U.S. Army for interactive systems to train and 
sustain mission-critical language skills that involve 
production as well as comprehension of language. 
The need for improved foreign language 
proficiency in functional areas, beyond the core 
language training provided at the Defense 
Language Institute, is threefold: (a) to maintain 
job-relevant language skills by intelligence 
personnel, (b) to promote communication among 
multinational forces in coalition operations at 
command and control and lower levels, and (c) to 
support peacekeeping missions and operations 
other than war. 
Driven by army requirements, ARI's program 
imposes the constraints of compactness, 
accessibility, and extendibility on a language tutor: 
It must run on readily available PCs, it must be 
tailorable by instructors to address changing 
scenarios of language use, and it must be 
potentially extendible across languages through the 
use of principled NLP formalisms. Meeting these 
goals has required a series of tradeoffs with power 
and depth of analysis in the NLP and tutoring 
components of ARrs systems. The ARI program is 
classified as exploratory development (6.2), and 
while its products are prototypes, they are 
nevertheless intended for near-term use in 
language learning labs and research settings. 
The program has completed development of a 
German tutor, equipped with multimedia interface 
and question-answer exercises overlying a parser 
and medium-size lexicon. Students' responses to 
questions are parsed and syntactic errors are 
reported to the tutor for flexible delivery to 
students. An authoring front-end enables 
nonprogrammers (instructors and instructional 
researchers) to add and change lessons, and to 
decide how, whether, and when to present 
grammatical feedback. A second tutor for Arabic 
and Spanish is now in development that adds 
immersion-like exercises involving graphics 
microworlds and constrained dialog. These 
exercises are supported by lexical conceptual 
structures (LCSs) for semantic analysis, an LCS 
editor usable by trained instructors, and a 
knowledge base and discourse tracker built with 
tools from ARPA's Planning Initiative. The 
program has so far demonstrated the extendibility 
of a principled-based parser from German to 
Arabic through parametefization of the basic 
formalism, as well as the scalability of LCSs 
originally developed for a demonstration machine 
translation system. All products, including 
mulfilingual parsers and lexicons, are available for 
use in other NLP applications by other developers. 
In addition, ARI is pursuing dual use development 
to transfer its language tutoring technology into 
public schools and universities. 
ARI's program is scheduled for completion at the 
end of FY95. Promising directions for future 
application of human language technology to 
language tutors include incorporating continuous 
speech recognition in a range of target languages 
and continuing the development of dialog and 
NLP-dnven animated graphics. 
In-house work to date includes user trials with 
army intelligence students and instructors, 
development of schemas for lesson design to 
exploit the capabilities and limitations of the NLP, 
and initiation of joint research with university 
language labs on the effects of tutoring variables, 
such as the level of detail and scheduling of 
grammatical feedback, with respect to individual 
difference characteristics of learners. 
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