How the PILÉFACE System, Dealing with Pragmatics, Takes Cultural Factors into Account

In the domain of language acquisition, PILÉFACE is a system that has been initially designed to take into account the pragmatic aspects of language, i.e. to provide the learner not only with a linguistic competence, but also with a communicative competence. That communicative competence implies that the language learner master certain pragmatic usage rules, which are mastered by the native speaker, but unspoken and unwritten, and therefore implicit. In that context, PILÉFACE is readily equipped to take into account many socio-cultural aspects of communication exchanges. In this paper, starting with culture-aware pedagogical dialogues, we show which types of cultural aspects may occur in such dialogues, how these cultural aspects are actually implemented in the data organization and system architecture of PILÉFACE, and how they could be extended using the same architecture.