BopoNoto: An Intelligent Sketch Education Application for Learning Zhuyin Phonetic Script

The zhuyin phonetic script not only provides greater learning benefits compared to romanization systems for Chinese Mandarin language students with existing English fluency, but also allows students to take advantage of its use in Taiwan where it exists in both official and popular usage. However, while penenabled computing educational applications can assist traditional pedagogical approaches for accelerating mastery of the script, existing approaches are either constrained in providing writing assessment, catered to native language users, or are less flexible in recognizing more natural writing. We present BopoNoto, an intelligent sketch education application for language students to learn zhuyin. Our application provides a sketching interface for practicing the symbols, and a sketch recognition system for assessing the visual and technical correctness of their input. From our evaluations, BopoNoto successfully demonstrates strong results in understanding and assessing students’ written input. Keywords-sketch recognition; intelligent user interface; intelligent tutoring system; Chinese Mandarin; zhuyin; bopomofo

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