The Utility of Combinatory Categorial Grammar in Designing a Pedagogical Tool for Teaching Languages

This paper intends to demonstrate how Applicative and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (ACCG) can be drawn on to design powerful software applications for the teaching of languages. To this end, we present some modules from our “pictographic translator”, a software that performs syntactical analysis of sentences in natural language directly written by the user, and then dynamically displays series of pictograms that illustrate the words and structure of the user’s sentences. After a short presentation of our application and an introduction to ACCG, we will examine how this formalism enables the building of several high-level functions in our system, such as disambiguation, structure exhibition and grammatical correction/validation. We finally open a short discussion concerning the potential (and limits) of this architecture with regards to multilingualism.