A multimedia database supports English distance learning

Presents an English-language distance-learning system, using multimedia database and Internet technologies, for Chinese students, called the English Multimedia Corpus. Research issues concerning "semantic querying" and "link grammar annotation" are applied to the database. It can promote the query level from keyword-based and content-based queries to the semantic level. These skills of "semantic querying" and "link grammars" have been used to construct the English Multimedia Corpus system, which has as its main function the querying of English sentence patterns in the corpus. The other function of the system is to detect grammatical errors in sentences written by students.