<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W96-0408">
  <Title>Considering the Effects of Second Language Learning on Generation</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="71" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Our long-term goal is to develop a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tool to help deaf students leam 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.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The approach we take is to view the student's leaming of written English as a task in second  linda_suri@ cidmac.wustl.edu language acquisition. In this respect, our effort is similar to other projects geared toward learning (English as) a second language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We envision a system that would be used by a par-Ocular student over an extended period of time. A student would use the system as a tutor, entering texts (perhaps of several paragraphs in length) that he/she has written. The system would analyze these texts for errors, engage the student in a corrective tutorial dialogue, and offer possible corrected versions for some of the original input sentences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> To accomplish these goals, the proposed system must have several components. First, it must have the ability to analyze texts that are input by the student and determine what/where errors occur.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Once the errors have been identified, the system must decide which of these errors it should concentrate on in its response to the student. Finally, the system must have the ability to generate appropriate corrective tutorial messages.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> While at first glance, one might think that problems of Natural Language Generation only occur in the last phase of the system processing, we believe that a &amp;quot;generation&amp;quot; perspective on the entire process is extremely beneficial. For example, the problem of identifying errors in the original input text may seem like an issue of straight analysis, but it is not completely so. While an error might be recognized doing a syntactic parse of the sentence, in order for beneficial correction, both the specific error and its probable source should be identified.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> Consider the following simple example: &amp;quot;My brother like to go...&amp;quot;. It is clear that there is a problem in subject-verb agreement; however, does it occur because (1) the noun should be in the plural form, (2) the verb should be in singular  form, or (3) the student doesn't know that such agreement exists in the language? Depending on the reason for the.mistake, different kinds of tutorial correction will likely be more helpful. Our belief is that in order to identify probable sources of errors, the developer must take into account the student's generation process. In other words, the eventual system must possess an understanding of what is causing the student to generate sentences that contain these mistakes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> In this paper we present a portion of our work that describes the student's generation process as it is affected by second language acquisition (SLA).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> Our linguistic model of the student's generation process essentially reflects those aspects of the second language that are currently being leamed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> This also has implications on the system's generation process. In particular we discuss two ways in which the system's responses can be tailored to the user. In deciding &amp;quot;what to say&amp;quot;, the system's generation can be tailored to focus on those errors that involve language features that the student is in the process of acquiring. In deciding &amp;quot;how to say it&amp;quot;, the system can attempt to use the constructions that are currently being leamed (as well as those that have been mastered) and so provide the student with correct exemplars of the second language. This is particularly important for the tutor we are developing since a lack of understandable input / feedback is a serious problem for the deaf community.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> After giving an overview of our project, we concentrate on how the student's generation process is represented in our system. We have developed a model of how the effects of the first language (in our case, ASL) can be accounted for in the analysis phase of our system, and are currently developing a model which captures the effects of language acquisition itself. We discuss how these models affect the system's decisions of both what to say (i.e., what errors to tutor the student about) and how to say it (i.e., what syntactic constructions to use in the realization of the system's message). null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>