Hector Institute for Empirical Educational Research

In recent years, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in education has developed rapidly, giving rise to a new branch of research called AIED (AI in Education). The main goal of this branch of research is to increase educational success through the targeted use of AI technologies. The focus is particularly on improving learning and teaching with the help of AI-supported approaches and tools.

Within this emerging field, a research group has been formed that specialises in the area of foreign language teaching (L2 teaching). This group has two central goals:

1. Develop a procedure for extracting linguistic knowledge in a foreign language (L2): This procedure aims to capture and model learners' linguistic knowledge in their second language. This is to create a deeper understanding of the learners' domain and knowledge in the second language.
    
2. Contribution to automatic natural language generation (NLG): Here the focus is on developing a technology that can control the generation of natural language. In particular, it should be possible to automatically adapt the difficulty of the generated language to the needs of the learners, especially for non-native speakers or people with a low language level.

The first component of the research builds on existing work on the representation of linguistic knowledge using Natural Language Processing (NLP). It extends these approaches to take into account linguistic complexity and thus increase the practical usefulness of this technology in education.

The second component aims to extend existing NLP approaches to create a technology that allows language complexity to be dynamically adjusted. This is particularly important to support the learning of non-native speakers and to ensure that the language generated meets individual learning needs.