Abstract
The preschool ”literacy gap” is one of the most difficult challenges for education in the US. Children in the lowest SES (Socio-Economic Status) quartile have less than half the working vocabulary of those in the top quartile at age 3. On the other hand, preschool children are incessantly inquisitive, and will readily engage in question answering and asking activities if given the opportunity. We argue here that question asking/answering technologies can play a major role in early literacy. We discuss the system implementation of a virtual agent called Spot, that plays a 20-questions game with preschoolers. We describe how a platform for speech-driven non-linear machinima was used to develop this agent. We also present a preliminary computational evaluation of the performance of the system in view of the data collected through a wizard-of-study.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
NELP: National Early Literacy Panel, Developing Early Literacy, National Institute for Literacy, NIFL (2008), http://www.nifl.gov
NFCL: National Family Literacy Organization, main site, http://www.famlit.org
NIH: Clear Communication: An NIH Health Literacy Initiative, http://www.nih.gov/clearcommunication/healthliteracy.htm
Hart, B., Risley, T.: Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children. Paul H. Brookes (1995)
Mol, S.E., Bus, A.G., de Jong, M.T., Smeets, D.J.: Added value of dialogic parent-child book readings: A meta-analysis. Early Education and Development 19, 7–26 (2008)
Kumar, A., Tewari, A., Shroff, G., Chittamuru, D., Kam, M., Canny, J.: An Exploratory Study of Unsupervised Mobile Learning in Rural India. In: Proceedings of CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia (2010)
Chouinard, M.M.: Childrens questions: A mechanism for cognitive development. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 72(1 Serial No. 286 ) (2007)
Wallace, R.: The elements of AIML style, Online text at http://www.alicebot.org/join.html
MacWhinney, B., Snow, C.: The Child Language Data Exchange System: An update. Journal of Child Language 17, 457–472 (1990)
Tewari, A., Goyal, N., Chan, M., Yau, T., Canny, J., Schroeder, U.: SPRING: Speech and Pronunciation Improvement through Games, for Hispanic children. In: To Appear in Proceedings of ICTD 2010, London (December 2010)
Hutchinson, H., Bederson, B.B., Druin, A.: Supporting Elementary-Age Children’s Searching and Browsing: Design and Evaluation Using the International Children’s Digital Library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, John Wiley and Sons 58(11), 1618–1630 (2007)
Callanan, M.A., Oakes, L.M.: Preschoolers questions and parents explanations: Causal thinking in everyday activity. Cognitive Development 7, 213–233 (1992)
Weizenbaum, J.: ELIZA - A Computer Program For The Study of Natural Language Communications Between Man and Machine. Communications of the ACM 9(1), 36–45 (1966)
Wallace, R.S.: Chapter 00. The Anatomy of A.L.I.C.E., http://www.alicebot.org/documentation
Carpenter, R.: Jabberwacky.com (1997-2006), http://www.jabberwacky.com
Kramer, N.C.: Psychological Research on Embodied Conversational Agents: The Case of Pedagogical Agents. Journal of Media Psychology 2010 22(2), 47–51 (2010)
Clarebout, G., Elen, J., Johnson, W.L., Shaw, E.: Animated pedagogical agents. An Opportunity to be Grasped? Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 11, 267–286 (2002)
Frazier, B.N., Gelman, S.A., Wellman, H.M.: Preschoolers Search for Explanatory Information Within AdultChild Conversation, Child Development, vol. 80(6), pp. 1592–1611 (November/December 2009)
Kam, M., Ramachandran, D., Devanathan, D., Tewari, A., Canny, J.: Localized Iterative Design for Language Learning in Underdeveloped Regions: The PACE Framework. In: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2007), pp. 1097–1106 (2007)
Hutchinson, H., Bederson, B.B., Druin, A.: Supporting Elementary-Age Children’s Searching and Browsing: Design and Evaluation Using the International Children’s Digital Library. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(11), 1618–1630 (2007)
MacWhinney, B., Snow, C.: The Child Language Data Exchange System: An update. Journal of Child Language 17, 457–472 (1990)
Lowood, H.: High-performance play: The making of machinima. In: Clarke, A., Mitchell, G. (eds.) Videogames and art: Intersections and interactions. Intellect, London
Perez-Marin, D., Pascual-Nieto, I.: Conversational Agents and Natural Language Interaction. Techniques and Effective Practices. IGI Global (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tewari, A., Brown, T., Canny, J. (2013). A Question-answering Agent Using Speech Driven Non-linear Machinima. In: Aylett, R., Krenn, B., Pelachaud, C., Shimodaira, H. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8108. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40415-3_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40415-3_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40414-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40415-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)