Abstract

The ELDIT project carried out at the European Academy
Bozen/Bolzano aims at creating an innovative language learning system for the population of South Tyrol, allowing them to prepare for the exams in bilingualism. The system is furthermore sufficiently general, so that everybody interested in learning the German or Italian languages can use it.  The project is carried out by linguists, language teachers, computational linguists, and computer scientists in interdisciplinary research work. The program can be freely used via the Internet (http://www.eurac.edu/eldit).

Efficient knowledge engineering is known to be a difficult task. On the one hand the linguists and language teachers demanded the implementation of very innovative but complex didactic ideas; on the other hand, approaching the realization in the usual way was judged as not feasible by them, since it would have meant the manual input and a detailed encoding of a large amount of data. Hence a new approach to content authoring was elaborated by the computer scientists which made it possible to develop the system with realistic resources.

The main solution I applied was (1) to support the linguists in the detailed data encoding process by electronically rewriting a hand made semi-structured version of the data into the final extensive version needed by the system and (2) to help them in the extensive data collection process by electronically adding as much information as possible to the manually collected educational data.

The approach we applied provided some more advantages: (3) the realization of some more innovative features than the linguists had originally demanded, became possible, (4) the inclusion of externally developed products that worked only on specific language features became feasible which considerably augmented the innovativeness of our system, and (5) the tools developed for data authoring were incorporated into the system and reused during runtime to provide
online authoring for teachers.

ELDIT is an ongoing research project that started in autumn  1999. The approach was appreciated and judged as feasible by the linguists in our team. Hence it was applied throughout the development of the system. Its flexibility for the implementation of didactic demands has been confirmed each time we programmed a new module for the program.