Includes bibliographical references.This work describes the human-computer interaction of an intelligent tutoring system designed to mediate some of the difficulties of acquiring proficiency in reading technical Japanese material.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. INT8818039

Maciejewski, Anthony A.

English

This work describes the human-computer interaction of an intelligent tutoring system designed to mediate some of the difficulties of acquiring proficiency in reading technical Japanese material.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. INT8818039

Maciejewski, Anthony A., author

IEEE, publisher

Mountain Scholar (Digital Collections of Colorado and Wyoming)

The Student-Computer Interface of an IntelligentTutoring System for .Japanese Language InstructionAnthony A. MaciejewskiSchool of Electrical EngineeringPurdue UniversityWest Lafayette, IN 47907AbstractThis work describes the human-computer interactionof an intelligent tutoring system designed to mediate someof the difficulties of acquiring proficiency in reading tech-nical Japanese material.I. IntroductionIn recent years, Japan has emerged as an acknowl-edged leader in several key areas of applied science andengineering. Japanese funding of R&D on a per capitabasis equals that of U.S. civilian R&D expenditures 11]and it's output of technical publications has steadily grownto 8% of the world total, second only to the United States[2]. Unfortunately, access to this wealth of informationis denied to most Western scientists and engineers--of theapproximately 10,000 technical journals that are publishedby the Japanese, only an estimated 6% are available in En-glish 11].The lack of Japanese language proficiency amongAmerican scientists and engineers is due to a number offactors including the inherent difficulty of the languageand the scarcity of technical curricula and course mate-rials [3]. The goal of this work is to mitigate some of thesedifficulties through the use of an intelligent computer tu-toring system. The remainder of this paper first presentsa brief summary of some of the unique characteristics ofthe Japanese language and is followed by a description ofthe student-computer interface of an intelligent tutoringsystem developed to accelerate the acquisition of technicalJapanese reading proficiency.II. The .Japanese LanguageThe Japanese language is generally regarded as one ofthe most difficult languages for English-speaking people tolearn. While the number of individuals studying Japaneseis increasing there remains an extremely high attritionrate, estimated by some to be as high as 80% 13]. Much ofthis difficulty can be associated with the Japanese writingsystem. Japanese text consists of two distinct orthogra-phies, a phonetic syllabary known as kana and a set of 10-gographic characters, originally derived from the Chinese,known as kanji. The kana are divided into two phoneti-cally equivalent but graphically distinct sets, katakana and311hiragana, both consisting of 46 symbols and two diacriticmarks denoting changes in pronunciation. The katakanaare usedprimarily for writing words of foreign origin thathave been adapted to the Japanese phonetic system al-though they are alsoused for onomatopoeia, colloquialismsand emphasis. The hiragana are used to write all inflec-tional endings and some types of native Japanese wordsthat are not currently represented by kanji. Due to thelimited number of kana, their relatively low visual com-plexity, and their systematic arrangement they do not rep-resent a significant barrier to the student of Japanese. Infact, the relatively small effort required to learn katakanayields significant returns to readers of technical Japanesedue to the high incidence of terms derived from Englishand transliterated into katakana.In contrast, the ability to read the much more visuallycomplex kanji, which are used to write the vast majority ofwords functioning as nouns, verbs, or adjectives, presents aformidable task, even for native Japanese. A dictionary ofall kanji ever used would contain on the order of 50,000 en-tries. Fortunately, 99% of all the currently used kanji canbe found in the six to seven thousand entries specified un-der the Japanese Standard Association's JIS X 0208 stan-dard. Though frequently considered to be graphical rep-resentations of objects or concepts, in actuality very fewkanji belong to the category of pictographs or ideographs.The vast majority (over 90%) can be classified as phonol-ogograms, characters composed from the combination ofa phonetic component and a general meaning component.The phonetic component, however, does not uniquely spec-ify the pronunciation of a character. This is due to thefact that kanji have multiple readings depending on thecontext. These readings are generally classified as eithernative Japanese (kun) or as being derived from the Chi-nese (on). The kun readings are generally usedfor single-character kanji or with inflected forms whereas on readingsare more frequently used in multiple kanji words. Excep-tions abound and phonologograms are frequently usedfortheir phonetic component while disregarding the meaningor vice versa (such compounds are called atejl).The difficulty of reading such a diverse and compli-cated character set is further magnified by the fact thatJapanese text does not possess unique characters to spec-ify lexical boundaries that correspond to the spaces usedbetween words in Western languages. Thus a student hasno idea whether a single kanji is to be interpreted as a com-CH2809-2/89/0000-0311 $1.00 © 1989 IEEEplete word or whether it is part of a compound. Likewisewith kana one must know whether it is being usedto repre-sent an inflectional ending or a separate word. Additionaldifficulty is presented by the fact that Japanese sentencestructure is basically Subject - Object - Verb (SOY) asopposed to the more common SVO structure of English.m. Student-Computer InteractionMany of the aspects of written Japanese discussedabove present serious difficulties to the student, particu-larly with respect to the use of traditional study aids suchas dictionaries and printed reference materials. Much ofthis is due to the fact that a significant amount of infor-mation must already be known about a Japanese "word"(number of characters, pronunciation, stroke counts, etc.)before it can even be accessed in such works. Thus eventhe use of phonetic conversion software of the type typi-cally used in Japanese word processors [4,5] provides min-imal assistance for identifying unknown passages of text.The tutor addresses this situation by not relying on anycategorization scheme based on phonetic alphabetizationor the pattern of strokes used to create the character. Theinteraction of the tutor with a student is presented in thefollowing example of a typical session.The tutor first addresses the issue of context by iden-tifying the student and accessing their personal databasewhich contains information about the their technical inter-ests as well as language proficiency. The keywords whichdefine the student's area are used to search the electronicdatabase of technical Japanese material. This databasecurrently consists only of selected Japanese abstracts andtheir associated English translations. The database oflanguage proficiency consists of the kanji and kanji com-pounds, along with their specific readings, to which thestudent has been exposed. These are divided into thosewhich have been mastered and those which require furtherreview. The database also includes a list of grammaticalstructures with which the student is familiar. The textwhich is chosen by the tutor for the student is thus de-signed to reinforce material which is not yet mastered andto introduce new material within a specific context. Theorder in which new kanji are presented is based on fre-quency counts within the desired discipline.The tutor presents the actual Japanese text on theterminal screen in exactly the same format as it appearsin the original Japanese publication. The addition of pho-netic readings in kana, known as furigana, is avoided al-though this practice is common in language textbooks.This reduces the tendency of the student to rely on thefurigana while reading thus preventing assimilation of thekanji. The text, while designed to maximize comprehen-sion from context, will clearly have material which is notgrasped by the student. When this occurs the student canhighlight the difficult passage with a mouse and requesta translation within this context. The tutor, detectingan input from the student, takes the highlighted Japanesetext, matches it with it's English translation, and displaysthis on the screen. At this point it takes all of the vocabu-lary and grammatical structures present in the highlighted312passage and updates the student's personal database toinclude these items in the material that is not currentlymastered. Thus those items with which the student hasdifficulty will be repeated with greater frequency in subse-quent sessions.The manner in which the student highlights the un-known text is significant with respect to the informationstored by the tutor. Any amount of text can be highlightedranging from a single character to an entire sentence. Thusthe tutor attempts to pinpoint the exact nature of the dif-ficulty by determining whether the highlighted region isan inftectional ending, a single word, a clause, etc. Thereis particular interest in analyzing student responses thatresult in regions which do not occur at morphological orlexical boundaries. This is, of course, a common occur-rence due to the lack of spacing between Japanese words.In the case that the student actually wants information onthe sentence structure, the interface is designed to allowthe student to click on the mouse while in a highlightedregion in order to move one level up in the parse tree rep-resenting the sentence. Thus the student can trace thestructure from a single morpheme to the entire sentence.In addition to the above general scenario of a tutoringsession, the tutor is being outfitted with electronic versionsof supplementary materials such as examples of handwrit-ten text and grammar references as well as general, techni-cal, and character dictionaries. These are all linked to thegraphical interface so that immediate access to all entriesrelated to the highlighted region can be obtained. Thisenvironment should accelerate the rate at which scientistsand engineers can acquire a reading knowledge of technicalJapanese.This material is based upon work supported by theNational Science Foundation under Grant No. INT-8818039. The Government has certain rights in thismaterial.References[1] P. H. Hubbard, President, Electronics EducationFoundation, American Electronics Association, Tes-timony before House Subcommittee on Science, Re-search, and Technology, June 26, 1985.[2] National Academy of Engineering, StrengtheningU.S. Engineering Through International Coopera-tion: Some Recommendations for Action, Washington,D.C., 1987.[3] D. O. Mills, R. J. Samuels, and S. L. Sherwood,Technical Japanese for Scientists and Engineers: Cur-ricular Options, a report to the National ScienceFoundation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,MITJSTP WP 88-02,1988.[4] J. D. Becker, "Multilingual word processing," Scien-tific American, pp. 96-107, July 1984.[5] J. D. Becker, "Typing Chinese, Japanese, and Ko-rean," IEEE Computer, Vol. 18, No.1, pp. 27-34, Jan-uary 1985.1 I

The student-computer interface on an intelligent tutoring system for Japanese language instruction

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