A question-answering agent using speech driven non-linear machinima

Abstract

The preschool "literacy gap" is one of the most difficult challenges for education in the US. Children in the lowest SES (Socio-Economic Status) quartile have less than half the working vocabulary of those in the top quartile at age 3. On the other hand, preschool children are incessantly inquisitive, and will readily engage in question answering and asking activities if given the opportunity. We argue here that question asking/answering technologies can play a major role in early literacy. We discuss the system implementation of a virtual agent called Spot, that plays a 20-questions game with preschoolers. We describe how a platform for speech-driven non-linear machinima was used to develop this agent. We also present a preliminary computational evaluation of the performance of the system in view of the data collected through a wizard-of-study. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.