Converting an electronic dictionary into a drill tutor

Electronic dictionaries have a potential which has been largely underexploited, in particular with respect to foreign language learning. Adding certain functions to them would considerably extend their usefulness. For example, such enhanced dictionaries could support people in theirs tasks of reading (in a script different than your mother tongue), writing (reveal the word that is on the tip of their tongue), memorising words, or automating basic syntactic structures. We will focus here on this latter aspect. That is, we will show here how to convert an electronic dictionary into a drill tutor or exercice generator, or, more precisely, a goal-driven, template-based sentence generator. The examples given are for learning japanese, yet the approach taken is general enough to allow for accomodation, that is, the computer program could be adapted to other languages, which is precisely our goal.