Bilingual Mapping Visualizations as Tools for Chinese Language Acquisition

We present the approach and prototype of a system that supports the acquisition of bilingual knowledge. In this paper we focus on the domain of vocabulary acquisition for Chinese. Mapping visualizations, especially Bilingual Knowledge Maps [1], can be used to foster acquisition of word knowledge, dictionary navigation, and testing. We developed style sheets that map between knowledge representation and visualization tailored for Chinese-English bilingual data. This is on the one hand used to generate maps that visualize knowledge in a pedagogically reasonable way. On the other hand, user input and knowledge base can be queried. This more sophisticated functionality is enabled by using Semantic Web techniques. These techniques further allow us to integrate different (possibly distributed) data sources that contain relevant relationships.

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