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ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011)Venice, Italy |
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ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011)Venice, Italy |
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This paper describes a competitive language translation
game aimed at improving students vocabulary and writing
skills. An automated agent is employed as an opponent in order
to improve the user’s motivation and maintain the user focused.
The agent’s actions are based on statistical machine translation
outputs. An evaluation that was performed with 20 Portuguese
learners of Mandarin suggested that users were more focused
and motivated when playing against the agent than playing
alone. Furthermore, the majority of students felt that the system
helped them learn Mandarin and would like to use it in the
future. The system has a web-based implementation and is easily
accessible by language learners.
Index Terms. computer assisted language learning, machine
translation, automated agent, educational games
Bibliographic reference. Ling, Wang / Trancoso, Isabel / Prada, Rui (2011): "An agent based competitive translation game for second language learning", In SLaTE-2011, 1-4.