Related papers: Not Just Duolingo: Supporting Immigrant Language P…
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!,…
Educational games can foster critical thinking, problem-solving, and motivation, yet instructors often find it difficult to design games that reliably achieve specific learning outcomes. Existing authoring environments reduce the need for…
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…
Empathy games are a promising yet new research avenue that explores how to design empathic game experiences that would help children to understand and address the emotions of other people. Research in this field was primarily done in the…
Lack of proper English pronunciations is a major problem for immigrant population in developed countries like U.S. This poses various problems, including a barrier to entry into mainstream society. This paper presents a research study that…
Indigenous languages are historically under-served by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community…
Various efforts in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community have been made to accommodate linguistic diversity and serve speakers of many different languages. However, it is important to acknowledge that speakers and the content they…
In Australia, post-contact language varieties, including creoles and local varieties of international languages, emerged as a result of forced contact between Indigenous communities and English speakers. These contact varieties are widely…
This paper provides a roadmap that explores the question of how to imbue learning agents with the ability to understand and generate contextually relevant natural language in service of achieving a goal. We hypothesize that two key…
Popular language learning applications such as Duolingo use large language models (LLMs) to generate lessons for its users. Most lessons focus on general real-world scenarios such as greetings, ordering food, or asking directions, with…
Indigenous languages of the American continent are highly diverse. However, they have received little attention from the technological perspective. In this paper, we review the research, the digital resources and the available NLP systems…
This study investigates how Southeast Asian (SEA) immigrant mothers in Taiwan participate in their children's home-based learning. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and diary studies, we explore how these mothers navigate sociocultural…
Grandparent-grandchild bonds are crucial for both parties. Many immigrant families are geographically dispersed, and the grandparents and grandchildren need to rely on remote communication to maintain their relationships. In addition to…
Language workbenches are tools that enable the definition, reuse, and composition of programming languages and their ecosystems, aiming to streamline language development. To facilitate their adoption by language designers, the…
Newcomer children face barriers in acquiring the host country's language and literacy programs are often constrained by limited staffing, mixed-proficiency cohorts, and short contact time. While Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) show promise…
Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…
In recent years, agents have become capable of communicating seamlessly via natural language and navigating in environments that involve cooperation and competition, a fact that can introduce social dilemmas. Due to the interleaving of…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to lack cultural representation and overall diversity in their generations, from expressing opinions to answering factual questions. To mitigate this problem, we propose multilingual prompting: a…
In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded…
Generative speech models have demonstrated significant potential in improving human-machine interactions, offering valuable real-world applications such as language learning for children. However, achieving high-quality, child-friendly…