Using ChatGPT as your personal language learning assistant
In this article, I want to quickly demonstrate how technologies such as ChatGPT might be used as personal language learning assistants in the future.
ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI that specializes in dialogue. The chatbot is a large language model fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. The base model that was fine-tuned was OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language model, an improved version of GPT-3.
You can try it yourself by creating an account on https://chat.openai.com.
If you find more use cases, feel free to add them to this Twitter thread.
⚠️⚠️⚠️ Note however, that it can’t be guaranteed that the answers the model gives are accurate. Take them with a grain of salt! This counts for all the examples I list below. This article tries to illustrate what is likely going to be possible in the future in the realm of computer assisted language learning with the help of large language models. ⚠️⚠️⚠️
It can correct sentences that are grammatically incorrect.
We can use it to transform an article from Wikipedia to its Simple English Wikipedia counterpart.
Let’s take this sentence: “The goal is to make computers that can understand the meaning of words and sentences *in order to* extract information and organize documents.”
How about we want to learn how to use “in order to” in English and look at some examples.
It can translate text and teach you words and phrases (including in this example the transliteration/Pinyin of the Chinese characters)
If you don’t know what Pinyin is you can just ask it to explain the system to you.
But how do you pronounce Chinese …? Take a look how it also refers back to the Pinyin system to explain the four tones and the their corresponding representations in Pinyin.
You can also specifically ask it how to pronounce words. Note also that it also points out its limitations when it comes to language related questions.
For example, when I asked it to generate a dialogue and a vocabulary list it came up with this nonsensical dialogue between “Samantha” and her teacher (in which the teacher gives a grammatically wrong explanation in the dialogue)
Creating vocabulary lists is another great use case though!
It also gives me this seemingly correct explanation which is wrong.
ChatGPT appears to be proficient in a number of languages! It’s a great tool for language learning. But be aware that the explanations it gives are not always 100% accurate.
