Computer users rarely experience entirely trouble-free interaction. The natural variety of individuals ensures that no software systems yield constantly fluent interaction for all users. In consequence, software designers often strive to ameliorate this situation by building 'user support' into their systems. User support can take different forms but, conventionally, each aims to assist the nee...

We present a system, called IMMIGRANT, which learns rules about the grammar of a second language from instructions. We explore the implications of this task on the representation of linguistic knowledge in a natural language understanding system. We conclude that the internal representation of linguistic knowledge used in IMMIGRANT, which is unification-based, is more amenable to language learn...

One of the simple facts of life in the present time is that the English language skills of a good proportion of its citizenry are seen as vital if a country is to participate actively in the global economy and to have access to the information and knowledge that provide the basis for both social and economic development. Central to this enterprise are English teaching and English language teach...

Recent concern with bilingual education has led to an increased interest in understanding the process of second-language acquisition. In this article Kenji Hakuta and Herlinda Cancino present a critical, historical overview of research on secondlanguage acquisition. In this account the authors outline four analytical upproaches-contrastive, error, performance, and discourse. annlysis-trace the ...