SBIR-STTR Award

Sources of machine-readable Cyrillic texts and public-domain language-processing software are especially to be sought. The output produced by the AMDS will be based on text-processing and natural language analyses which will provide insight into the lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic characteristics of Russian source texts, so teachers of Russian can relate classroom materials more directly to specific pedagogical goals and to selected content areas in an area studies or international studies curriculum. A microcomputer-based prototype AMDS will be developed and demonstrated in Phase I. In Phase II, the full AMDS will be implemented, and made available for national distribution. The AMDS built in Phase II will also be the major software resource used to develop an automated Russian verb dictionary, based on Tesniere's Valence Grammar Theory, which has proven especially effective in Europe for teaching Russian and other syntactically complex languages.Anticipated results/

Potential Commercial Applications:
Phase I: AMDS design and facsimile output reports, prototype implementation and users manual. Phase II: full AMDS, full users manual, valence dictionary of Russian verbs. Phase III: advanced CAI environments, Russian machine translation system, desktop publishing environment for Russian textbooks and classroom materials.