The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

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Abstract

We report progress on a new approach to combatting illiteracy -- getting computers to listen to children read aloud. We describe a fully automated prototype coach for oral reading. It displays a story on the screen, listens as a child reads it, and decides whether and how to intervene. We report on pilot experiments with low-reading second graders to test whether these interventions are technically feasible to automate and pedagogically effective to perform. By adapting a continuous speech recognizer, we detected 49% of the misread words, with a false alarm rate under 4%. By incorporating the interventions in a simulated coach, we enabled the children to read and comprehend material at a reading level 0.6 years higher than what they could read on their own. We show how the prototype uses the recognizer to trigger these interventions automatically.

Notes

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Project LISTEN

Associated Project(s): Project LISTEN's Reading Tutor

Note: Recipient of the AAAI-94 Outstanding PaperAward

Text Reference

Jack Mostow, Steven F. Roth, A. G. Hauptmann, and M. Kane, "A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens," Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), American Association forArtificial Intelligence, August, 1994, pp. 785 - 792.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Mostow_1994_2721,
   author = "Jack Mostow and Steven F Roth and A. G. Hauptmann and M. Kane",
   title = "A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-94), American Association forArtificial Intelligence",
   pages = "785 - 792",
   month = "August",
   year = "1994",
   Notes = "Recipient of the AAAI-94 Outstanding PaperAward"
}

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