Giving Help and Praise in a Reading Tutor with Imperfect Listening--Because Automated Speech Recognition Means Never Being Able to Say You're Certain

Human tutors make use of a wide range of input and output modalities, such as speech, vision, gaze, and gesture. Computer tutors are typically limited to keyboard and mouse input. Project LISTEN’s Reading Tutor uses speech recognition technology to listen to children read aloud and help them. Why should a computer tutor listen? A computer tutor that listens can give help and praise naturally and unobtrusively. We address the following questions: When and how should a computer tutor that listens help students? When and how should it praise students? We examine how the advantages and disadvantages of speech recognition technology helped shape the design and implementation of the Reading Tutor. Despite its limitations, this technology enables the Reading Tutor to provide patient, unobtrusive, and natural assistance for reading aloud.

[1]  Jack Mostow,et al.  The Sounds of Silence: Towards Automated Evaluation of Student Learning in a Reading Tutor that Listens , 1997, AAAI/IAAI.

[2]  Jack Mostow,et al.  Demonstration of a reading coach that listens , 1995, UIST '95.

[3]  E. Capaldi,et al.  The organization of behavior. , 1992, Journal of applied behavior analysis.

[4]  Jared Bernstein,et al.  A voice interactive language instruction system , 1991, EUROSPEECH.

[5]  Mary E. Curtis,et al.  Development of Components of Reading Skill. , 1980 .

[6]  Gregory Aist.  Challenges for a Mixed Initiative Spoken Dialog System for Oral Reading Tutoring , 1997 .

[7]  Jack Mostow,et al.  How effective is unsupervised data collection for children's speech recognition? , 1998, ICSLP.

[8]  Jack Mostow,et al.  Towards a Reading Coach that Listens: Automated Detection of Oral Reading Errors , 1993, AAAI.

[9]  Barbara A. Fox.  The Human Tutorial Dialogue Project: Issues in the Design of instructional Systems , 1993 .

[10]  Judith D. Wilson,et al.  Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems , 1990 .

[11]  Martin J. Russell,et al.  Applications of automatic speech recognition to speech and language development in young children , 1996, Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP '96.

[12]  Jack Mostow,et al.  A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens , 1994, AAAI.

[13]  Mei-Yuh Hwang,et al.  The SPHINX-II speech recognition system: an overview , 1993, Comput. Speech Lang..

[14]  Gregory Aist.  Expanding a time-sensitive conversational architecture for turn-taking to handle content-driven interruption , 1998, ICSLP.

[15]  Ilene Kantrov.  Talking to the Computer: A Prototype Speech Recognition System for Early Reading Instruction. Report No. 91-3. , 1991 .

[16]  Jack Mostow,et al.  Evaluating tutors that listen: an overview of project LISTEN , 2001 .