Related papers: ContextQ: Generated Questions to Support Meaningfu…
When caregivers ask open--ended questions to motivate dialogue with children, it facilitates the child's reading comprehension skills.Although there is scope for use of technological tools, referred here as "intelligent tutoring systems",…
To acquire language, children need rich language input. However, many parents find it difficult to provide children with sufficient language input, which risks delaying their language development. To aid these parents, we design Captivate!,…
Children in a large number of international and cross-cultural families in and outside of the US learn and speak more than one language. However, parents often struggle to acquaint their young children with their local language if the child…
Assessment of reading comprehension through content-based interactions plays an important role in the reading acquisition process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for generating comprehension questions geared to K-2 English…
Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains…
Joint reading is a key activity for early learners, with caregiver-child interactions such as questioning and feedback playing an essential role in children's cognitive and linguistic development. However, for some parents, actively…
Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions.…
Automatic question generation can benefit many applications ranging from dialogue systems to reading comprehension. While questions are often asked with respect to long documents, there are many challenges with modeling such long documents.…
Curiosity is an important factor that favors independent and individualized learning in children. Research suggests that it is also a competence that can be fostered by training specific metacognitive skills and information-searching…
Using online information discovery as a case study, in this position paper we discuss the need to design, develop, and deploy (conversational) agents that can -- non-intrusively -- guide children in their quest for online resources rather…
Dialogic learning fosters motivation and deeper understanding in education through purposeful and structured dialogues. Foundational models offer a transformative potential for child-robot interactions, enabling the design of personalized,…
We propose a novel text generation task, namely Curiosity-driven Question Generation. We start from the observation that the Question Generation task has traditionally been considered as the dual problem of Question Answering, hence…
To address the data scarcity issue in Conversational question answering (ConvQA), a dialog inpainting method, which utilizes documents to generate ConvQA datasets, has been proposed. However, the original dialog inpainting model is trained…
Most learners fail to develop deep text comprehension when reading textbooks passively. Posing questions about what learners have read is a well-established way of fostering their text comprehension. However, many textbooks lack…
In multi-turn dialog, utterances do not always take the full form of sentences \cite{Carbonell1983DiscoursePA}, which naturally makes understanding the dialog context more difficult. However, it is essential to fully grasp the dialog…
Parenting brings emotional and physical challenges, from balancing work, childcare, and finances to coping with exhaustion and limited personal time. Yet, one in three parents never seek support. AI systems potentially offer stigma-free,…
Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based…
As minimally verbal autistic (MVA) children communicate with parents through few words and nonverbal cues, parents often struggle to encourage their children to express subtle emotions and needs and to grasp their nuanced signals. We…
Closed-book question answering (QA) requires a model to directly answer an open-domain question without access to any external knowledge. Prior work on closed-book QA either directly finetunes or prompts a pretrained language model (LM) to…
Questions asked by humans during a conversation often contain contextual dependencies, i.e., explicit or implicit references to previous dialogue turns. These dependencies take the form of coreferences (e.g., via pronoun use) or ellipses,…