COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Social-Emotional Analysis of the Language Environment (SEAL): Key Word & Phrase Spotting in Early Childhood Care Settings

合作研究：语言环境的社会情感分析 (SEAL)：关键词

• 批准号: 2234916
• 负责人: John Hansen
• 金额: $ 6.11万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Dallas
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-06-15 至 2024-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2234916&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: COLLABORATIVE; RESEARCH; Social; Emotional; Analysis

o This project is jointly funded by the Developmental Science Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).Children’s success in school and in life depends on whether they have learned certain social and emotional skills in their early years. To build teachers’ capacity to promote social emotional learning, there is a need for tools that provide data-based feedback to teachers on talk that focuses on social-emotional learning. This project creates such a tool, the Social Emotional Analysis of the Language Environment (SEAL). SEAL uses advanced speech processing algorithms to automatically capture a key element of teacher practice in early childhood education classrooms known to support social emotional learning: their use of language, and specifically, words and phrases within everyday interactions that tap into social emotional learning. This automatic measurement of teachers’ social-emotional talk from audio recordings in toddler classrooms could represent a transformative approach to help teachers better support children’s social-emotional development (e.g., understanding, managing, and expressing emotions). In turn, such a tool could better ensure young children gain the skills that ensure they are ready for school, relationships, and life. Project activities to demonstrate proof-of-concept for SEAL include: (1) developing a social and emotional word and phrase bank, informed by a national survey and focus groups with early childhood professionals and input from an expert advisory panel; (2) exploring teacher audio data to refine existing speech processing algorithms to detect classroom adult social emotional key words and phrases; and (3) examining initial validity of the word and phrase bank by comparing human transcription to a baseline algorithm to automatically detected speech data. This probe study serves to create evidence that a future fully formulated SEAL solution could yield data that will be easy to access and interpret and can be used by individual teachers, coaches, and early childhood programs to improve practices aimed at promoting child social emotional outcomes. Eventually, like an automated monitor for counting steps, we envision SEAL could be used by teachers themselves to monitor classroom social emotional talk and build capacity to improve social emotional competence in young children.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

o 该项目由发展科学计划和刺激竞争性研究既定计划 (EPSCoR) 联合资助。儿童在学校和生活中的成功取决于他们在早年是否学习了某些社交和情感技能。为了培养教师促进社交情感学习的能力，需要一种工具为教师提供基于数据的反馈，以关注社交情感学习的谈话。该项目创建了这样一个工具：语言环境的社会情感分析（SEAL）。 SEAL 使用先进的语音处理算法来自动捕获已知支持社交情感学习的幼儿教育课堂中教师实践的关键要素：他们在日常互动中使用语言，特别是利用社交情感学习的单词和短语。这种通过幼儿课堂录音自动测量教师社交情感谈话的方法可以代表一种变革性方法，帮助教师更好地支持儿童的社交情感发展（例如理解、管理和表达情感）。反过来，这样的工具可以更好地确保幼儿获得技能，确保他们为上学、人际关系和生活做好准备。展示 SEAL 概念验证的项目活动包括：(1) 开发一个社会和情感单词和短语库，根据全国调查和由幼儿专业人士组成的焦点小组以及专家咨询小组的意见提供信息； （2）探索教师音频数据，完善现有的语音处理算法，检测课堂成人社交情感关键词和短语； (3) 通过将人工转录与自动检测语音数据的基线算法进行比较，检查单词和短语库的初始有效性。这项探索性研究旨在提供证据，证明未来完全制定的海豹突击队解决方案可以产生易于访问和解释的数据，并且可供教师、教练和幼儿项目使用，以改进旨在促进儿童社交情感结果的实践。最终，就像计算步数的自动监视器一样，我们设想教师自己可以使用 SEAL 来监视课堂社交情感谈话，并培养提高幼儿社交情感能力的能力。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。