Click on the left-side image to select your language. Press Alt key and click on word to activate the contextual translation

Architecture

Exills works in an ASP (i.e. Application Service Provider) mode. As a consequence, in order to use Exills you just need to connect to an Internet or Intranet application.
Exills' interface includes virtual reality scenes, which required installing a pluggin.

Although Exills integrates several complex technologies, its way of use is as simple as you can think! You just need to connect to a website (e.g. ) to be immersed into an online language course... Through this website, you have access to the ultimate research technologies built at the European Research Centre of Xerox (XRCE), like linguistic technologies and collaborative ones or even smart search engines.

Although Exills integrates several complex technologies, it is very simple to use. You just need to connect to a website (e.g. www.exills.com) to be immersed into an online language course Through this website, you can try the most up-to-date research technologies from the Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE). They include: linguistic technologies, collaborative technologies and smart search engines.

Technologies Involved

• Virtual reality platform (VWP 5.1 from Blaxxun)

  Virtual Worlds Platform (VWP) offers the possibility to 3D chat that enables learners to communicate all together. VWP also allows defining robots. Robots are configured and reply to stimuli like new learner arriving in a scene, learner asking for a private chat. The scenario followed by robots is defined thanks to a script language in which we have plugged linguistic services in order to give the learner access to contextual translations, spell checking, language identification or verb conjugation. VWP manages the synchronous connections and the pedagogic state of each learner is store in a database.

• XRCE (Xerox Research Centre Europe): linguistic and collaborative research technologies
  

• XeLDA©

provides a generic engine framework for linguistic treatment of text applications, based on an open architecture which easily admits extensions integrating future Xerox-proprietary finite-state research results. Potential applications of the XeLDA engine include: comprehension aids and translation over a network, on a desktop or a portable PC, syntax checking, terminology extraction, and authoring tools in general. XeLDA describes the architecture of the server, running on a Unix or Windows computer. It was designed as such a framework to provides developers and researchers with a common development architecture for the open and seamless integration of linguistic services.
In Exills, XeLDA provides translations services, morphology analysis and also language identification.

• spellchecker

In Exills, learners of French have access to a phonetic spellchecker.

• askOnce

askOnce is your personal 'single click' access point for finding exactly the information that you need. askOnce is a web-based meta-search application that allows you to search multiple repositories and data-types with a single query. Simply logon to the askOnce server, enter your search criteria, and select the supported information sources you wish to search. Then askOnce conducts precise searches across any repository, any website in any language and generates a coherent synthesis of the most relevant information for your immediate use. Everything is presented in a clear, consistent manner on a single screen; just click the document reference to go directly to the source.
Exills provides an access to askOnce in order to help learners to get and retrieve more information from Internet (and eventually from their Intranet company or even their personal sources of knowledge), once learners have identified texts or multimedia documents that seem interesting to them, they can post them onto KP recommendation services.

• Knowledge Pump

Knowledge Pump provides users with personalised recommendations for things to read. When users sign up, they join communities of people with similar interests. Profiler agents track and map each user's interests, learning more about the person each time (s)he uses the Pump. A recommender agent finds matches between new items and user preferences, automatically sending relevant and high quality information to people as it is found.
We propose learners to use Knowledge Pump to recommend other learners texts they find in correlation with the course contents. Doing this, learners can capitalize on their colleges work; the tutor can verify the way learners have understand a course and eventually reuse part of the proposed text in the course itself.

• Web@ssistant

provides Comprehension Aid that sits between machine translation and human translation.
Xerox Web@ssistant allows you to get a precise understanding of multi-word expressions in their context. They are quick, accurate and easy to use: you simply highlight a word on screen and click on it to get instant understanding: translation or definition. This is achieved by the linguistic precision of our XeLDA engine.
Web@ssistant has available in all the html pages of Exills. Using it, learners have a simple and effective access to the meaning of a word in their own language.