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SWIM or Sink: The Problem of Communicating Thought

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Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Foreign Language Learning

Part of the book series: NATO ASI Series ((NATO ASI F,volume 80))

Abstract

The goal of this paper is twofold (a) to present a system which aims to allow students to learn in an intuitive, meaningful and intelligent way to produce sentences in French; and (b) to describe a methodology for solving a particular problem that arises with this system: the control of conceptual input. Since SWIM is an attempt to mimic natural learning, —it is the student who asks the questions and the system which answers them,— we are faced with a communication problem. How can we ask the system “how does one say <x>?”, if we don’t know in what terms to specify, hence convey the content of x (meaning, message) ? In other words, how can we communicate thought without using a natural language? We shall discuss in this paper a first attempt to solve this problem. More precisely, we shall present the sketch of an interface, —a semantically driven message editor,— that should ultimately allow even naive users to communicate complex thoughts in a natural way.

SWIM is the acronym of See What I Mean ? The system has been implemented by A. Laroui in LeLisp on a Macintosh. I would like to thank Lary Taylor from Apple Europe for the support of this work.

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© 1992 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Zock, M. (1992). SWIM or Sink: The Problem of Communicating Thought. In: Swartz, M.L., Yazdani, M. (eds) Intelligent Tutoring Systems for Foreign Language Learning. NATO ASI Series, vol 80. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77202-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-77202-3_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-77204-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-77202-3

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