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A Pragmatic Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality in Digital Game-Based Language Learning

Paper · 2025 · Monica Ward, Liang Xu and Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha

Summary

The paper shows how to build a digital educational game for the Irish language with limited resources. Irish lacks high-quality CALL applications and language technologies, and assembling an interdisciplinary team is difficult. The authors describe the development of Cipher: Faoi Gheasa, a game for beginners. In folktales and folklore texts, the player searches for words that a villain has "enchanted": they are written backwards, without vowels, with the last letter doubled, and so on. The player then has to identify which spell was applied. The pragmatic approach consists of reusing existing resources: the Dúchas.ie archive, the abair.ie TTS, a morphological analyser and a POS tagger. New components were added selectively: a tool for assessing the readability of Irish texts, images from Midjourney and a pilot VR version. Genuine spelling errors were abandoned because learners found them too difficult to spot. The game was tested in three Dublin schools, and teachers and pupils responded very positively. The game engine is language-independent, so the approach is proposed as a model for other Celtic and low-resource languages.

Key points

  • The texts for the game are taken from the Dúchas.ie Schools Collection. These are folklore records made in the 1930s by schoolchildren aged 12–14.
  • abair.ie voices words in three dialects at different speeds. The grammatical features for the spells are provided by a finite-state morphological analyser and a rule-based POS tagger (Uí Dhonnchadha & Van Genabith, 2006).
  • A new semi-automatic readability tool had to be created for Irish. It combines lexical and grammatical complexity features with machine learning, since no ready-made equivalents of Flesch Kincaid or Gunning Fog exist for this language.
  • The spells highlight features specific to Irish: accented vowels, initial mutations, noun gender. For example, the Méadú Guta spell makes all vowels accented.
  • Among the limitations, the authors name the small story bank, the fact that only three schools took part in testing, and that the VR version is still at the pilot stage.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksDevelopmental and Educational Psychology · 499 works

💡 Concepts 1Key ideas and methods explained on our concept pages.Artificial intelligence · 49 works

Cite

Cite as Monica Ward, Liang Xu and Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha. 2025. A Pragmatic Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality in Digital Game-Based Language Learning. Proceedings of the 5th Celtic Language Technology Workshop.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{ward2025pragmatic,
  title = {{A Pragmatic Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality in Digital Game-Based Language Learning}},
  author = {Monica Ward, Liang Xu and Elaine Uí Dhonnchadha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th Celtic Language Technology Workshop},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.cltw-1.3/}
}

References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Ward, M. (2017). ICALL’s relevance to CALL. CALL in a climate of change: adapting to turbulent global conditions–short papers from EUROCALL, 328. find
  2. Beatty, K. (2013). Teaching & researching: Computer-assisted language learning. Routledge. find
  3. Xu, L., and Chamberlain, J. (2020, May). Cipher: a prototype game-with-a-purpose for detecting errors in text. In Workshop on Games and Natural Language Processing (pp. 17-25). find
  4. Bryant, C., Yuan, Z., Reza Qorib, M., Cao, H., Tou Ng, H. & Briscoe, T. (2023). Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey of the State of the Art. find
  5. Computational Linguistics 2023; 49 (3): 643–701. https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00478 ↗
  6. Xu, L., Dhonnchadha, E. U., & Ward, M. (2022a). User experience study of" Cipher: Faoi Gheasa", a digital educational game for language learning and student engagement. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Games Systems (pp. 5-8). find
  7. Gunning, R. (1952). Technique of clear writing. McGraw-Hill. find
  8. Purgina, M., Mozgovoy, M., & Ward, M. (2017). MALL with WordBricks–building correct sentences brick by brick. CALL in a climate of change: adapting to turbulent global conditions–short papers from EUROCALL, 254-259. find
  9. Xu, L., Uí Dhonnchadha, E. & Ward, M. (2022b). Faoi Gheasa: an adaptive game for Irish language learning, ACL 2022 ComputEL Workshop, Dublin, Ireland, 26-27 May, 2022 find
  10. Mc Cahill, L., Baltazar, T., Bruen, S., Xu, L., Ward, M., Uí Dhonnchadha, E., & Foster, J. (2024, May). Exploring Text Classification for Enhancing Digital Game-Based Language Learning for Irish. In Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the SIGUL@ LREC-COLING 2024 (pp. 90-96). find
  11. Xu, L., Andrade, M., Uí Dhonnchadha, E., and Ward, M. (2024a). Cipher in Classrooms: Evaluating Digital Game-Based Language Learning for Irish Vocabulary Acquisition. 13th International Games and Learning Alliance (GALA 2024) Conference. Serious Game Society, Berlin, Germany. find
  12. Kincaid, J. P. (1975). Derivation of new readability formulas (automated readability index, fog count and flesch reading ease formula) for navy enlisted personnel. Chief of Naval Technical Training. find
  13. Xu, L., Du, H., Jia, S., Andrade, M., Ennis, C., Uí Dhonnchadha, E., and Ward, M. (2024b). Mythology Meets Technology: Transforming a 2D Game into a Virtual Reality Journey for Language Reconnection. IEEE 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR 2024), Coimbra, Portugal. find
  14. Schroeder, S., Richter, T., McElvany, N., Hachfeld, A., Baumert, J., Schnotz, W., Horz, H., & Ullrich, M. (2011). Teachers’ beliefs, instructional behaviors, and students’ engagement in learning from texts Xu, L., Uí Dhonnchadha, E., and Ward, M. (2023). Harnessing the power of images in CALL: AI im… find
  15. Schulze, M. (2008). AI in CALL—Artificially inflated or almost imminent?. Calico Journal, 25(3), 510-527. find
  16. Uí Dhonnchadha, E., Bruen, S., Xu, L., & Ward, M. (2024, May). Empowering Adaptive Digital Game- find

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