End-to-End Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System for Learning Basic Mathematics

The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.Comment: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Mathematical Natural Language Processing (MathNLP) at EMNLP 202

An Overnight Educational Transformation: How did the Pandemic Turn Early Childhood Education Upside Down?

Since the spring of 2020, many early childhood education programs (pre-K, K, 1st, and 2nd grades) had to close as governments around the world took serious measures to slow down the transmission of COVID-19. As a result, the pandemic forced many early childhood teachers to start teaching online and continue supporting their students remotely. Unfortunately, there were few lessons that these teachers could learn from experience to cope with this change since online learning in early childhood settings had been scarce until the outbreak of the pandemic. In response, the goal of this interview study was to investigate how early childhood teachers in public and private schools implemented online learning during the pandemic, the challenges they encountered when teaching online, and their suggestions to address these challenges. The results showed that the teachers did not sit still and patiently wait for the re-opening of the schools. Instead, they took assorted initiatives to support their students’ learning and development remotely. They faced several challenges on the way but also suggested various methods to address these challenges through developmentally appropriate technology use. The results of this study have implications for teachers when early childhood programs return to normal. The study creates opportunities for future research to gain greater understanding of the design and implementation of online learning activities with young learners