The Nihonogo tutorial system: an intelligent tutoring system for technical Japanese language instruction

Abstract

The Nihongo Tutorial System is an intelligent tutoring system designed to assist English-speaking scientists and engineers in acquiring reading proficiency in Japanese technical literature. The system provides individualized lessons by matching a student's technical area of interest and Japanese language ability with the available instructional materials which are derived from actual technical articles. This approach is designed to maximize comprehension through context by assuring an appropriate amount of new material and by drawing on the student's expertise in the subject matter. The instructional texts are encoded in a data structure that maintains syntactic, semantic, phonetic, and morphological information that can be delivered to the student upon request. The system also provides on-line supplementary materials including a character dictionary, a general dictionary, a grammar dictionary, and several technical dictionaries for additional information. Thus the Nihongo Tutorial System provides an efficient aid for acquiring the vocabulary, syntax, and style of Japanese texts from a specific technical discipline.