ABSTRACT
We have designed and implemented a parser for German and Arabic, developed to support a language tutor called BRIDGE, whose aim is to reinforce language skills of early intermediate students of these two languages (between skill levels 1 and 2). This tutor is being developed for military linguists in the U.S. Army and is sponsored by the Army Research Institute (ARI). Other chapters in this volume-by Sams and by Kreyer and Criswell-discuss the tutorial aspects of BRIDGE from the perspectives of the student and the instructor/author, respectively. The necessary components for natural language understanding by machine, known as natural language processing (NLP), include decomposing words into their meaningful subparts (morphological analysis), representing possible patterns of combination for sentence formation (syntactic analysis), and mapping these patterns onto an appropriate meaning (semantic analysis). This chapter focuses on the lexical and syntactic components that comprise the NLP system in the BRIDGE tutor. The principles behind these components are being applied in the development of a Spanish and Arabic parser for a second generation ARI system, the Military Language Tutor, described by Kaplan and Holland (this volume).
