Related papers: Infant directed speech is consistent with teaching
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which results in altered behavior, social development, and communication patterns. In past years, autism prevalence has tripled, with 1 in 54 children now affected. Given that…
With the rapid advancement of conversational and diffusion-based AI, there is a growing adoption of AI in educational services, ranging from grading and assessment tools to personalized learning systems that provide targeted support for…
A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…
Clarifying user needs is essential for existing task-oriented dialogue systems. However, in real-world applications, developers can never guarantee that all possible user demands are taken into account in the design phase. Consequently,…
Speech data has rich acoustic and paralinguistic information with important cues for understanding a speaker's tone, emotion, and intent, yet traditional large language models such as BERT do not incorporate this information. There has been…
Autism, also known as Autism Spectrum Disorder (or ASD), is a neurological disorder. Its main symptoms include difficulty in (verbal and/or non-verbal) communication, and rigid/repetitive behavior. These symptoms are often indistinguishable…
Speech AI Technologies are largely trained on publicly available datasets or by the massive web-crawling of speech. In both cases, data acquisition focuses on minimizing collection effort, without necessarily taking the data subjects'…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social communication and behavioral patterns. Eye movement data offers a non-invasive diagnostic tool for ASD detection, as it is inherently…
As data science emerges as a distinct academic discipline, introductory data science (IDS) courses have also drawn attention to their role in providing foundational knowledge of data science to students. IDS courses not only help students…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…
From the earliest years of our lives, humans use language to express our beliefs and desires. Being able to talk to artificial agents about our preferences would thus fulfill a central goal of value alignment. Yet today, we lack…
Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that imitate human tutors and aim to provide immediate and customized instructions or feedback to learners have shown their effectiveness in education. With the emergence of generative artificial…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for adults' speeches has made significant progress by employing deep neural network (DNN) models recently, but improvement in children's speech is still unsatisfactory due to children's speech's distinct…
Open conversations are one of the most engaging forms of teaching. However, creating those conversations in educational software is a complex endeavor, especially if we want to address the needs of different audiences. While language models…
Expressive text-to-speech (TTS) aims to synthesize different speaking style speech according to human's demands. Nowadays, there are two common ways to control speaking styles: (1) Pre-defining a group of speaking style and using…
In this thesis, we try to build a connection between the two schools by introducing syntactic inductive biases for deep learning models. We propose two families of inductive biases, one for constituency structure and another one for…
One of the long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to build an agent that can communicate intelligently with human in natural language. Most existing work on natural language learning relies heavily on training over a pre-collected…
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…
Learning to understand speech appears almost effortless for typically developing infants, yet from an information-processing perspective, acquiring a language from acoustic speech is an enormous challenge. This chapter reviews recent…
Classroom environments are particularly challenging for children with hearing impairments, where background noise, multiple talkers, and reverberation degrade speech perception. These difficulties are greater for children than adults, yet…