04.02.2021

Research grant success

Aisla: An intelligent assistant for English language acquisition in authentic contexts

Xiaobin Chen, in collaboration with Detmar Meurers, Björn Rudzewitz, Simón Ruiz, and Florian Nuxoll, has successfully applied for funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As part of the ministry's research program on human-technology interaction, "Bringing technology to people," the ministry is providing 588,452 euros for the project "Aisla: An intelligent assistant for English language acquisition in authentic contexts" for three years.

The project aims at building an intelligent assistant Aisla in the form of a mobile app for training spoken English within real-life contexts. It will make use of the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in Natural Language Processing (NLP), conversation systems, and Computer Vision (CV) to provide foreign language learners who lack the opportunities to practice spoken English in their daily life with a virtual intelligent language partner and teacher for learning English. It is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon both AI-driven Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and second language acquisition research. The project will address CRA 1's research focus on how modern technology can be integrated into current language education.