Dreistadt: A language enabled MOO for language learning

Abstract

Dreistadt is an educational MOO (Multi User Domain, Object Oriented) for language learning. It presents a virtual world in which learners of German communicate with their fellow learners, teachers and native language users in other locations via the Internet. While the original Dreistadt had an artificial command language for interaction with the system, we have provided it with natural language processing capabilities, in order to allow a more seamless linguistic interaction. For this purpose, an NLP interface for controlled German has been added. The student's natural language commands are translated to system internal instructions by a set of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis tools. The system is capable of handling pronouns and other referring expressions by applying domain knowledge and includes an inferencing component based on predicate logic.