PC Games Teach Soldiers Foreign Tongues

March 9 -- Military computer simulations are teaching soldiers how to triumph in battle against foreign combatants. But winning the peace afterwards may require a new computer game — one that helps train fighting forces to have friendly chats with the natives.

Computer science professors at the University of Southern California, with funding from DARPA, have been working on a simulation program designed to help military personnel perform a more prevalent — and difficult — task in the international war on terrorism: communicating peacefully and correctly with foreigners in their own native tongues.

By knowing the local lingo, "peace-keeping" and "nation-building" tasks — locating suspected terrorists, helping to rebuild roads and local infrastructure, gaining the trust of local leaders, and so forth — would be a lot easier to accomplish in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan. And the idea, says Lewis Johnson, director of the Center for Advanced Research in Technology for Education (CARTE) at USC, was that computer games, programmed with artificially intelligent "agents" could help soldiers develop those much needed linguistic abilities.

"We proposed that to DARPA," says Johnson. "They were interested in supporting new training technology and recognized that [foreign] language skills was a big gap right now."

For over a year, Johnson and his team along with input from instructors at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., have worked on developing the idea of a high-tech language simulator. The result: The Tactical Language Training System.

The program is based on the graphics capabilities of Unreal Tournament, a consumer computer game that has been popular with game players for its team-based approach to virtual combat.

But, Johnson and his team of researchers have tweaked the game by adding a "speech recognition" engine and their own "intelligent agents," software code that "reacts" to how a user speaks and what he says.