Towards the Use of Dialog Systems to Facilitate Inclusive Education

Continuous advances in the development of information technologies have currently led to the possibility of accessing learning contents from anywhere, at anytime, and almost instantaneously. However, accessibility is not always the main objective in the design of educative applications, specifically to facilitate their adoption by disabled people. Different technologies have recently emerged to foster the accessibility of computers and new mobile devices, favoring a more natural communication between the student and the developed educative systems. This chapter describes innovative uses of multimodal dialog systems in education, with special emphasis in the advantages that they provide for creating inclusive applications and learning activities

Analyzing oral skills in voice e-mail and online interviews

This study investigated the acquisition of speaking skills in an online distance education course of 19 first semester Spanish learners. The possibility of oral development in a strictly online course was examined based on students' pronunciation production in two types of recorded speaking activities and in two real-time conversations. Students created two types of voiced audio e-mails each week during the semester: read aloud passages and grammar-drill completions. In order to determine whether students' pronunciation indeed improved over the course of the semester, their performance on these two types of audio e-mails were compared at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester. In addition, students participated in two Internet-mediated oral conversations with their instructor using MSN messaging at the mid-term week and final week of the semester. Three kinds of data were collected from the conversations: an articulation score (articulation = pronunciation, stress, and intonation), an accuracy score, and a proficiency score. Students' performance on these interviews provided further evidence regarding the development of their oral skills. The findings suggest that only in the area of oral proficiency were there significant gains in scores

Call in the year 2000: Still in search of research paradigms?

Advancements in the design and use of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) activities require that key questions about CALL be identified and effective research methods be used to answer them. In this paper, I suggest looking to research on other types of second language (L2) classroom learning activities for guidance in framing CALL research questions and in discovering relevant research methods. I begin with examples from the CALL literature demonstrating the diverse perspectives (e.g., cognitive psychology, constructivism, psycholinguistics) which have been suggested as ways of approaching CALL research. I then summarize the research questions and methods of L2 classroom research with emphasis on the interactionist approach and discourse analysis. Using three examples --computer-mediated communication, a microworld, and vocabulary in reading-- I will illustrate how similar discourse analysis methods can address essential descriptive and evaluative questions about CALL activities. Finally, I will outline some implications of this perspective for design and investigation of CALL activities

A Proposal to Create Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds Integrating Advanced Educative Resources

Social Networking has been a global consumer phenomenon during the last few years. Online communities are changing the way people behave, share and interact within their daily lives. Most of such communities are mainly focused on sharing contents and communicating using a traditional web interface. However, social virtual worlds are computer-simulated environments that the users can "inhabit" and in which they can interact and create objects. Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. In this paper, we highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. We have implemented the proposal in a learning system for several subjects of the Computer Science degree in our university and show that it fostered engagement and collaboration and helped the students to better understand complex concepts.Research funded by projects CICYT TIN 2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC 2011-28626 C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485), and DPS 2008-07029-C02-02.Enviad

On the voice-activated question answering

[EN] Question answering (QA) is probably one of the most challenging tasks in the field of natural language processing. It requires search engines that are capable of extracting concise, precise fragments of text that contain an answer to a question posed by the user. The incorporation of voice interfaces to the QA systems adds a more natural and very appealing perspective for these systems. This paper provides a comprehensive description of current state-of-the-art voice-activated QA systems. Finally, the scenarios that will emerge from the introduction of speech recognition in QA will be discussed. © 2006 IEEE.This work was supported in part by Research Projects TIN2009-13391-C04-03 and TIN2008-06856-C05-02. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor V. Marik.Rosso, P.; Hurtado Oliver, LF.; Segarra Soriano, E.; Sanchís Arnal, E. (2012). On the voice-activated question answering. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews. 42(1):75-85. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCC.2010.2089620S758542

Advancements in AI-driven multilingual comprehension for social robot interactions: An extensive review

In the digital era, human-robot interaction is rapidly expanding, emphasizing the need for social robots to fluently understand and communicate in multiple languages. It is not merely about decoding words but about establishing connections and building trust. However, many current social robots are limited to popular languages, serving in fields like language teaching, healthcare and companionship. This review examines the AI-driven language abilities in social robots, providing a detailed overview of their applications and the challenges faced, from nuanced linguistic understanding to data quality and cultural adaptability. Last, we discuss the future of integrating advanced language models in robots to move beyond basic interactions and towards deeper emotional connections. Through this endeavor, we hope to provide a beacon for researchers, steering them towards a path where linguistic adeptness in robots is seamlessly melded with their capacity for genuine emotional engagement

Modelling speaker adaptation in second language learner dialogue

Understanding how tutors and students adapt to one another within Second Language (L2) learning is an important step in the development of better automated tutoring tools for L2 conversational practice. Such an understanding can not only inform conversational agent design, but can be useful for other pedagogic applications such as formative assessment, self reflection on tutoring practice, learning analytics, and conversation modelling for personalisation and adaptation. Dialogue is a challenging domain for natural language processing, understanding, and generation. It is necessary to understand how participants adapt to their interlocutor, changing what they express and how they express it as they update their beliefs about the knowledge, preferences, and goals of the other person. While this adaptation is natural to humans, it is an open problem for dialogue systems, where managing coherence across utterances is an active area of research, even without adaptation. This thesis extends our understanding of adaptation in human dialogue, to better implement this in agent-based conversational dialogue. This is achieved through comparison to fluent conversational dialogues and across student ability levels. Specifically, we are interested in how adaptation takes place in terms of the linguistic complexity, lexical alignment and the dialogue act usage demonstrated by the speakers within the dialogue. Finally, with the end goal of an automated tutor in mind, the student alignment levels are used to compare dialogues between student and human tutor with those where the tutor is an agent. We argue that the lexical complexity, alignment and dialogue style adaptation we model in L2 human dialogue are signs of tutoring strategies in action, and hypothesise that creating agents which adapt to these aspects of dialogue will result in better environments for learning. We hypothesise that with a more adaptive agent, student alignment may increase, potentially resulting in improved engagement and learning. We find that In L2 practice dialogues, both student and tutor adapt to each other, and this adaptation depends on student ability. Tutors adapt to push students of higher ability, and to encourage students of lower ability. Complexity, dialogue act usage and alignment are used differently by speakers in L2 dialogue than within other types of conversational dialogue, and changes depending on the learner proficiency. We also find different types of learner behaviours within automated L2 tutoring dialogues to those present in human ones, using alignment to measure this. This thesis contributes new findings on interlocutor adaptation within second language practice dialogue, with an emphasis on how these can be used to improve tutoring dialogue agents

The Effect of Parental Absence on Children’s Literacy Development: A Case Study of a Fourth-Grade Elementary School Student

The research analyzed the parental role in the literacy development of a fourth-grade Midwestern elementary school student in the United States of America. The subject selection was based on the beginning of the year assessment, which showed an early second-grade literacy level. Data were collected through observation and in-depth interviews with the homeroom teacher, reading specialist, and the subject for one semester. The observation notes, and interview transcriptions were coded. The four emerging themes were the subject’s literacy level, parental background, the caregiver’s literacy belief and behavior, the home literacy environment, and the subject’s literacy interest. The analysis showed that parental absence affected the subject’s lack of motivation in facing academic challenges and literacy difficulties. Low motivation led to low academic achievements, including literacy. The caregiver, which was the grandfather, did not display his parental role in reinforcing the subject’s literacy. A home literacy-rich environment was not created. The caregiver did not expose the subject to literacy-related activities at home. Meaningful conversation on literacy activities and achievements was not made between the caregiver and the subject, which was suggested to be the factor that caused the subject’s difficulties in processing and delivering information.  The limited parental support by the caregiver on the subject’s literacy activities and resources was analyzed to be the instrumental factor that caused the subject’s difficulties in reading and writing

Acomodación fonética durante las interacciones conversacionales: una visión general

During conversational interactions such as tutoring, instruction-giving tasks, verbal negotiations, or just talking with friends, interlocutors’ behaviors experience a series of changes due to the characteristics of their counterpart and to the interaction itself. These changes are pervasively present in every social interaction, and most of them occur in the sounds and rhythms of our speech, which is known as acoustic-prosodic accommodation, or simply phonetic accommodation. The consequences, linguistic and social constraints, and underlying cognitive mechanisms of phonetic accommodation have been studied for at least 50 years, due to the importance of the phenomenon to several disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology. Based on the analysis and synthesis of the existing empirical research literature, in this paper we present a structured and comprehensive review of the qualities, functions, onto- and phylogenetic development, and modalities of phonetic accommodation.Durante las interacciones conversacionales como dar una tutoría, dar instrucciones, las negociaciones verbales, o simplemente hablar con amigos, los comportamientos de las personas experimentan una serie de cambios debido a las características de su interlocutor y a la interacción en sí. Estos cambios están presentes en cada interacción social, y la mayoría de ellos ocurre en los sonidos y ritmos del habla, lo cual se conoce como acomodación acústico-prosódica, o simplemente acomodación fonética. Las consecuencias, las limitaciones lingüísticas y sociales, y los mecanismos cognitivos subyacentes a la acomodación fonética se han estudiado durante al menos 50 años, debido a la importancia del fenómeno para varias disciplinas como la lingüística, la psicología, y la sociología. A partir del análisis y síntesis de la literatura de investigación empírica existente, en este artículo presentamos una revisión estructurada y exhaustiva de las cualidades, funciones, desarrollo onto- y filogenético, y modalidades de la acomodación fonética