Kathleen McCoy (U. of Delaware): <BR>
Generation Issues in a Second Language Learning Tool
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ABSTRACT

Traditionally the task of natural language generation has been broken
into two components: what to say (i.e., what information should be
included in a response and how should it be structured) and how to say
it (i.e., what syntactic structures should be chosen for each
generated sentence).  In this talk I discuss some issues that these
two components must take into account in the context of a writing tool
for teaching English as a second language.  Our long-term goal is to
develop a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tool to help deaf
students learn written English. The targeted students are users of
American Sign Language (ASL), a language that is very different from
English in its structure and discourse strategies.  The approach we
take is to view the student's learning of written English as a task in
second language acquisition.  I argue that in order for the system to
be an effective language tutor, it must consider the generation
process of the student.  By this I mean that the system must be aware
of what English constructions the student has already mastered, what
constructions the student is in the process of mastering, and what
constructions are beyond the student's current ability.  I discuss how
this information affects the generation decisions of the tutoring
system and describe our method for capturing how this information
changes over time.

The models are motivated through describing its application in the
project geared for native users of American Sign Language (ASL)
learning written English, but I indicate how the models might be used
by learners coming from other native languages as well.
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BIOGRAPHY

I am an associate professor in the Dept. of Computer and Information
Sciences at the University of Delaware which I joined in September of
1985.  I received my PhD in the Dept. of Computer and Information
Science of the University of Pennsylvania 1985, and my MS from the
same institution in 1982.  I have worked in the general area of
natural language generation since my graduate student days and have
been an active member of that and the wider computational linguistics
community. For example, I have served on the editorial board of the
Computational Linguistics Journal and have served on the executive
committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics.  My work
has spanned additional areas including natural language discourse
(particularly the areas of focus and pronoun resolution), user
modeling, AI and education, intelligent user interfaces, and
interfaces designed to enhance communicative abilities of people with
disabilities.
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