An Exploratory System to Teach English as a Second Language to Deaf Students with American Sign Language Competency

这项工作的长期目标是为美国手语（ASL）的本地用户开发一种书写工具。envision是一个计算机系统，它可以接收由聋人用户编写的一段文本，分析文本中的错误，与该用户进行教程对话，并对文本进行适当的更正。为设想的系统奠定了一些必要的基础。一个感兴趣的领域是话语结构和衔接错误的检测和纠正。重点是涉及到先前在语篇中介绍的项目的错误。因为有证据表明，许多写作错误是由于从美国手语到英语的策略迁移造成的，所以在纠正中参考美国手语可能是有益的。这需要灵活的校正系统设计，能够模块化地改变校正策略的内容和形式。反馈是根据每个用户的需求、偏好和能力量身定制的。这是通过开发语言驱动的用户模型来跟踪用户的英语习得，以及一个能够根据不同习得水平定制输出的句子生成器来实现的。

The long term goal of this work is to develop a writing tool for native users of American Sign Language (ASL). Envisioned is a computer system that will take a piece of text written by a deaf user, analyze that text for errors, engage that user in a tutorial dialogue, and generate appropriate corrections to the text. Some of the necessary foundation for the envisioned system are laid. One area of interest is the detection and correction of discourse structuring and cohesion errors. Emphasis is on errors involving reference to items previously introduced in the discourse. Because there is evidence that many of the writing errors found are attributable to transfering strategies from ASL to English, reference to ASL in the correction may be beneficial. This requires a flexible correction system design which is able modularly alter the content and form of a correction strategy. Feedback is tailored to the needs, preferences, and abilities of each individual user. This is achieved through the development of a linguistically motivated user model to track the user's acquisition of English, and a sen tence generator which is able to tailor its output to the various levels of acquisition.