An agent based competitive translation game for second language learning
Wang Ling, Isabel M. Trancoso, Rui Prada · 2011
This paper describes a competitive language translation game aimed at improving students vocabulary and writing skills.An automated agent is employed as an opponent in order to improve the user's motivation and maintain the user focused.The agent's actions are based on statistical machine translation outputs.An evaluation that was performed with 20 Portuguese learners of Mandarin suggested that users were more focused and motivated when playing against the agent than playing alone.Furthermore, the majority of students felt that the system helped them learn Mandarin and would like to use it in the future.The system has a web-based implementation and is easily accessible by language learners.