ABSTRACT

Herr Kommissar is a German-language intelligent computer-assisted language learning (ICALL) environment masquerading as a role-playing detective game. Herr Kommissar begins by looking up each word of the learner's input query in its on-line German lexicon. In so doing, it detects and corrects most garden-variety misspellings. Herr Kommissar then maps the results of its lexical and syntactic analysis onto an internal model of the input's meaning. In general, Herr kommissar's design has been driven less by theoretical considerations than by a practical commitment to building a working instructional environment for second language acquisition. As the preceding overview indicates, Herr Kommissar does draw extensively on existing natural language processing and knowledge representation theory, but it adapts the theory to the pragmatic requirements of processing the kind of language produced by learners, as distinct from native speakers. In the process, it addresses such discourse-level phenomena as paraphrase, ellipsis, and anaphoric or deictic reference.