A virtual assistant architecture to support the delivery of texts in languages teaching - learning processes

Abstract

This paper presents the architecture of a Virtual Assistant that supports the delivery of texts in languages teaching–learning processes. Two specific functions for the assistant are defined: writing and grammatical assistance. On one hand, writing assistance provides students recommendations about the type of paragraph that they want to write.  And, on the other hand, grammatical assistance provides students a feedback about their mistakes in the texts that they  produce.  The  assistant  has  features  related  with  three  technological  elements:  i)  software  agents,  ii)  virtual  learning  environments  and  iii)  computational  linguistics.  These  features  allow  to  provide  the  functionalities  for  language processing and they provide students’ recommendations about their writing processes.The main purpose of  this  assistant  is  to  help  the  students  to  improve  their  writing  skills,  when  they  interact  into  a  virtual  learning  environment. The proposed architecture was implemented in a platform called Lingweb, wich is a prototype of a Course Management System for the languages teaching-learning processes.