Digital cultural heritage and revitalization of endangered Finno-Ugric languages

The preservation of linguistic diversity has long been recognized as a crucial, integral part of supporting our cultural heritage. Yet many “minority” languages—those that lack official state status—are in decline, many severely endangered. We present a prototype system aimed at “heritage” speakers of endangered Finno-Ugric languages. Heritage speakers are people who have heard the language used by the older generations while they were growing up, and who possess a considerable passive competency—well beyond the “beginner” level,—but are lacking in active fluency. Our system is based on natural language processing and artificial intelligence. It assists the learners by allowing them to learn from arbitrary texts of their choice, and by creating exercises that engage them in active production of language—rather than in passive memorization of material. Continuous automatic assessment helps guide the learner toward improved fluency. We believe that providing such AI-based tools will help bring these languages to the forefront of the modern digital age, raise prestige, and encourage the younger generations to become involved in reversal of language decline.Peer reviewe

Integration of computer-aided language learning into formal university-level L2 instruction

This paper presents our experience from pilot studies оn integration of intelligent learning and tutoring tools into official curricula for foreign/second-language (L2) learning. We report specifically on initial studies with learners of Russian as a second language at major universities in Italy and in Finland. An important challenge in both of these educational situations is the heterogeneous nature of the student contingent, including the presence of a sizable proportion of ‘heritage’ learners. Furthermore, the groups are often very large, which motivates the integration of an ICALL system. We describe the first integration attempt, an analysis of the emerging aspects and problems, and the design of a new experiment, which is on-going and takes into account the lessons learned. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on large-scale ICALL studies involving substantial numbers of ‘high-stakes’ learners of Russian at the intermediate-to-advanced levels – i.e., learners beyond the elementary level.Peer reviewe