Developing the 24/7 language tutor
News @ Wheaton, November 2005
A small group of Wheaton students are exploring the future of computer intelligence while also studying an ancient language.
The students, who are enrolled in a class on the Anglo-Saxon language, receive tutoring from a Web-based computer program called King Alfred, which tracks each user's every action and points out what each student has mastered and which areas still need work. As the student learns, so does the computer, pointing out new gaps in each person's language acquisition.
"User modeling" is the term Wheaton computer science professor Lisa Michaud employs to describe what King Alfred does. The concept has been applied in many areas, including the business world. Consider how Amazon.com recommends new books to users based on what they've purchased, browsed through in the past or placed on a wish list. That's user modeling, Michaud says.
"One of the big issues in user modeling these days is the goal of making web searching more personal to you," Michaud says. "This would mean having the computer know what interests you and then interpret the search terms you use to filter results to the types of information you are actually looking for."
That's no easy feat. Anyone who has ever used Microsoft Word's grammar checker knows that computers are a long way from actually understanding what we mean. The problem, says Michaud, is that computers depend upon artificial languages in which every word has only one meaning. Natural languages, such as English, are replete with words that have multiple meanings, meanings determined by the context in which they are used.
"That is the problem and the beauty of our language," said Michaud, who majored in both English and computer science as an undergraduate at Williams College. "We wouldn't want our language to be unambiguous. That's what makes it interesting; that's what makes literature rich. However, the ambiguity of natural languages creates a huge divide between computers and humans.
"You can't really say to the VCR, 'Hey, would you tape West Wing for me tonight?'," says Michaud. "We have to speak to machines in very specific terms. Our life would be a lot easier if computers could do real translation."
You just don't understand
Michaud is very familiar with the problems inherent in making a computer understand what users mean, rather than what they say. For the better part of a decade, she has worked on a computer program designed to help deaf students whose first language is American Sign Language learn to write in English with her mentor, Kathleen McCoy at the University of Delaware. They have been prolific; in fact, the pair have published three articles on their findings in three years.
Since arriving at Wheaton in 2002, Michaud had been on the lookout for a new project to which she could apply her expertise in computational linguistics, and in which she could involve Wheaton undergraduates. Professor of English Michael Drout had the perfect project. He authored an early version of King Alfred (named after the Saxon monarch who sponsored translation of Latin texts into Old English) with then-students David Dudek '01 and Rachel Kappelle '01, but the program needed major overhauls.
Michaud and a student, Joseph Lavoine '06, a computer science major and English minor who received a Emily C. Hood Fund for Arts and Sciences Partnership to support his work, spent the summer rewriting the program from scratch. "We probably each wrote several thousand lines of code this summer," she said. "And the paint is still drying on this project. There are parts of the system that weren't deployed until the first few weeks in the semester had passed."
Plans for the future of King Alfred include "a ton of features" that Michaud didn't have time for this year, as well as in-depth analyses of students' experiences with the system, based on a survey of their perceptions about how it worked as well as the record of each user's path through the exercises.
The project fits Michaud's interests perfectly because it transcends traditional disciplines. "That's why I'm here at Wheaton," she said. "I knew that I wanted to be in a liberal arts environment. I didn't want to be at a place where people would ask why you were interested in more than one subject."