NRI: INT: COLLAB: Development, Deployment and Evaluation of Personalized Learning Companion Robots for Early Literacy and Language Learning

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This National Robotics Initiative project will develop, deploy and evaluate personalized companion robots to assist kindergarten-age children in learning language and vocabulary skills. The aim is to accelerate the impacts of social robots for early education in schools and at home. The four-year project will advance knowledge in three key areas: (1) automatic speech recognition models for young children; (2) multi-modal student assessment algorithms for early language and literacy skills; and (3) personalization of activities, content, and dialogic question generation to boost learning outcomes. The project will generate new insights for how to develop expressive, socially responsive robots that provide more effective, engaging, and empathetic educational experiences for young children. To evaluate the impacts of long-term interactions on educational outcomes, the project team will conduct a 4-month study with Kindergarten classrooms, as well as a 3-month at-home study. The project will engage teachers and parents to develop key guidelines for best practices for use of social robots in classroom and home settings, and participating undergraduate and graduate students will be trained in the multidisciplinary aspects of social robotics, speech recognition and understanding, human participation studies, interactive machine learning for automatic assessment and personalization tools, and early education research. This research and development project will be implemented in two phases: An initial phase consisting of short pilot deployments to train and continually iterate development of project technologies and systems, followed by longer term deployment of the robot to examine autonomous interactions with social robots in school and home educational settings. During the development stage of individual components (automatic reading and language assessment tools, automatic question-generation algorithm, automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding system models, and activities with the autonomous social robot learning companion) the project team will collect and analyze data with practical and performance measures, and refine and iterate each component of the system being developed. After development of the individual components, the autonomous social robot storytelling companion will be developed through repeated iterations with children. In the final year of the project, two 4-month studies will be conducted in six Kindergarten classrooms with 15 to 20 students each. This project is expected to result in five key contributions: (1) Development of Automatic Speech Recognition and Spoken Language Understanding systems for young children's speech, (2) Multi-modal automatic assessment algorithms for Kindergarten age children's spoken language and early reading skills; (3) Automatic personalization algorithms for story content customization and dialogic question generation in the context of young children's verbal storytelling; (4) Development of a fully autonomous, collaborative, peer-like social robot system with effective educational activities; and (5) Long-term studies with deployed social robots in schools and homes spanning several months and demonstrating sustained engagement and positive learning outcomes.