On July 22, Jack Mostow gave an invited keynote address in Barcelona, Spain, at the 42nd meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (http://www.acl2004.org/Invited-talk-Mostow.htm). The title was "If I Have a Hammer: Computational Linguistics in a Reading Tutor that Listens."

Abstract:

Project LISTENs Reading Tutor uses speech recognition to listen to children read aloud, and helps them learn to read, as evidenced by rigorous evaluations of pre- to posttest gains compared to various controls. In the 2003-2004 school year, children ages 5-14 used the Reading Tutor daily at school on over 200 computers, logging over 50,000 sessions, 1.5 million tutorial responses, and 10 million words. This talk uses the Reading Tutor to illustrate the diverse roles that computational linguistics can play in an intelligent tutor: ? A domain model describes a skill to learn, such as mapping from spelling to pronunciation. ? A production model predicts student behavior, such as likely oral reading mistakes. ? A language model predicts likely word sequences for a given task, such as oral reading. ? A student model estimates a students skills, such as mastery of grapheme-to-phoneme mappings. ? A pedagogical model guides tutorial decisions, such as choosing words a student is ready to try. A recurring theme is the use of big data to train such models automatically.

Jack Mostow, Research Professor, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Robotics, Language Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction, Automated Learning and Discovery Director, Project LISTEN: A Reading Tutor that Listens

Personal home page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mostow
Project LISTEN home page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~listen
Email:mostow@cs.cmu.edu
Phone: 412-268-1330 voice,
412-268-6436 FAX
Mail:
CMU-RI-NSH 4213,
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Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890