ABSTRACT
Spion is a German-language adventure game for college language students, first programmed in 1981. Its designers intended to use its parser as a platform for the development of more extensive and more sophisticated tutorial German parsers. Although Spion and its daughter versions were indeed used by many college students of German, the program's phrase-structure-based syntactic element and its lexical-semantic element ultimately proved impractical for further development. More capacious machines, more flexible programming languages, and changed goals superseded Spion's parser. Syncheck, the designers' subsequent comprehensive syntactic parser of German, has little in common with Spion. Yet the experience gained from several years of working with Spion, discussed in this chapter, has proved illustrative of certain problems and solutions for interdisciplinary teams working on artificial intelligence (AI) applications for language learning.
