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<Paper uid="E89-1017">
  <Title>TENSE GENERATION IN AN INTELLIGENT TUTOR FOR FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING: SOME ISSUES IN THE DESIGN OF THE VERB EXPERT</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5. CONCLUSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the paper we have presented some issues involved in the design of a verb generation module within a research project aimed at developing an ITS capable of teaching the English verb system. A first prototype of ET has been fully implemented in MRS (LISP augmented with logic and rule-programming capabilities and with specific mechanism for representing meta-knowledge) on a SUN 3 workstation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> - 128 Our primary goal in this phase of the project has been the cognitive adequacy of the verb expert. In order to develop it, we took a pragmatic approach, starting with the identification of the features traditionally considered by grammars, constructing rules of tense selection grounded on this features and, finally, refining features and rules according to the results obtained through their use.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The work presented here relates both to the research carried out in the fields of linguistics and philosophy, concerning theories of verb generation and the temporal meaning of verbs, respectively, and the field of intelligent tutoring systems. As far as the first topic is concerned, we claim that teaching a foreign language can constitute a good benchmark for evaluating the soundness and completeness of such theories. In the field of foreign language teaching, on the other hand, the only way to build articulated, glass-box experts is to provide them with language capabilities such as those devised and described by linguistic theories.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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