Session 7: Demonstrations

Jack Mostow, fzom CMU, began the evening by showing a prototype reading coach designed to help children read by listening to them reading aloud. The system follows along as the student reads, detecting when words are not read correctly or when the reader gets stuck. Reading disfluencies are evaluated by a rulebased pedagogical evaluation component, which chooses appropriate interventions to help the reader. These interventions include asking the reader to re-read a word or a phrase, pronouncing a difficult word to the reader, ignoring the error, giving the reader a chance to correct the mis-reading in the context of a fluent reading of the initial part of the sentence, and reading the whole phrase to the reader. The system currently runs on a combination of DEC-Alpha and NeXT computers, with adult voices reading and mis-reading children's stories.