Artificial intelligence tools for grammar and spelling instruction

✍ Scribed by Fieny Pijls; Walter Daelemans; Gerard Kempen

• Book ID: 104627573
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 802 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-4277
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00117750

✦ Synopsis

In The Netherlands, grammar teaching is an especially important subject in the curriculum of children aged 10-15 for several reasons. However, in spite of all attention and time invested, the results are poor. This article describes the problems and our attempt to overcome them by developing an intelligent computational instructional envirormaent consisting of: a linguistic expert system, containing a module representing grammar and spelling rules and a number of modules to manipulate these rules; a didactic module; and a student interface with special facilities for grammar and spelling. Three prototypes of the functionality are discussed: BOUWSTEEN and COGO, which are programs for constructing and analyzing Dutch sentences; and TDTDT, a program for the conjugation of Dutch verbs.

1 Grammar and spelling instruction: problems

In The Netherlands and in Flanders, grammar teaching is an especially important subject in the curriculum of children aged 10-15. Three reasons are the following:

1 Grammatical knowledge is generally considered necessary to improve the quality of writing skills.

2 The orthography of Dutch depends to a considerable extent on grammatical relationships within the sentence. In many cases the correct spelling of a word cannot be derived from memorized word spellings or word-based phoneme-tographeme rules. A typical example is provided by the Dutch homophonous passive auxiliaries word and wordt. Choosing between them presupposes the explicit application of subject-verb agreement rules.