Farzad Ehsani, Sehda Inc.
Kathaleen Egan, AAT
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is emerging as a novel application of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, helping students of a foreign language interact with an automated tutor to improve their enunciation and dialogue skills. There are several challenging problems that are being tackled to make CALL systems available in a widespread manner. Above and beyond the basic problem that ASR technology usually performs poorly on nonnative speakers of a language, there is the whole issue of dialogue or discourse management, which a human tutor handles rather intuitively but which a computer must be explicitly designed to address. We will introduce the audience to some basic concepts in CALL, discuss some of the solutions that have been explored and present a couple of demonstration systems for a Japanese and Arabic language tutor.