A Free-Form Dialog Program in Spanish

Abstract

SPANLAP is a computer program which attempts to engage students of Spanish in a free-form written dialog by allowing them to ask questions. The program performs morphological, syntactic, and some semantic parsing of the student input, and either generates a response according to predetermined patterns or selects a response written by an instructor. Although unfinished, the program is functional, and demonstrates the feasibility of communicative programs for students of foreign languages.