ABSTRACT
The BRIDGE project was a multiyear research and development effort encompassing the design, development, and evaluation of an adaptive tutor for for~gn languages. Part of a program in advanced language technologies sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Institute (ARI), BRIDGE integrates natural language processing (NLP) components into tutor and author interfaces. The name, BRIDGE, describes the tutor's function of providing language practice to military personnel between the time they graduate language school at the Defense Language Institute and the time they use their language on the job, often many months later. During this interval, filled with job-related training but with limited resources to maintain language skills, student foreign language proficiency typically drops off. Thus, there is a serious and widespread need for effective language maitenance training and, moreover, for methods that make that training easy to develop.
