At the European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano an interdisciplinary team consisting of linguists, computer scientists and language teachers is working on the ELDIT project. The ELDIT program (Electronic learners Dictionary German Italian) is an online platform for beginning to intermediate language learners. It is targeted at German native speakers that wish to learn Italian and Italian native speakers that wish to learn German. Currently ELDIT includes a learners' dictionary, a text corpus (texts of the so-called exams in bilingualism), a grammar module and interactive quizzes.
The platform offers the learning material for an autonomous preparation for the exams in bilingualism in South Tyrol. The dictionary as well as the texts, which are out of different domains (family live, hobbies, holidays, culture ...), are however designed in a very general way such that they are suitable for different learning situations. The program is on one hand a useful instrument for autonomous learning, on the other hand it can be equally well used in traditional classroom lectures.
Technologically and linguistically, the organization and presentation of the contents are unique and highly innovative. From the linguistic point of view modern ideas coming from didactics and psycholinguistics have been explored, from the technological point of view common Web-based approaches have been combined with computational linguistics and Artificial Intelligence techniques.
Hence, the ELDIT program resulted in a product which is innovative and recognized within the research community (in the year 2002 the team has been awarded with the
"Anerkennungspreis 2002 für Forschungs- und Studienprojekte der Eduard-Wallnöfer-Stiftung" http://www.industrie-tirol.at/Initiativen/wallnoefer.html) as well as within the users' community (log statistics revealed that the system is used by far over 100 persons a day).
A preliminary version of the system can be freely accessed at http://www.eurac.edu/Eldit. Please check the "info" button within the ELDIT system or our publications for a more extensive description in German, Italian or English.
project:
