The fawlty article tutor

Abstract

Non-native speakers of English often have trouble with the correct use of articles in English. The rules found in grammar texts are based on typical usage and are often incomplete, too specialised, and riddled with exceptions. Because it is difficult to remember all the rules, people memorise a few basic rules and try to generalise to all situations. This paper deals with the implementation of Fawlty, an intelligent tutoring system which attempts to teach correct article usage. Fawlty classifies nouns along six dimensions and teaches the rules that govern article usage for particular values of two or more of these dimensions. Student modelling and various heuristics are used to make the tutoring more responsive to student needs.