A reading comprehension education AI technology has been developed by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) that enables users to learn foreign language listening, reading, and speaking by talking to an artificial intelligence (AI) tutor.
ETRI researchers demonstrate the reading comprehension education conversation technology of the reading comprehension education AI system. Image Credit: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
This method is anticipated to be of great help in the spread of AI-based language education services.
The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) launched a reading comprehension AI tutor, an artificial intelligence technology that has been developed for reading education, that introduced deep learning-based dialog processing technology to reading comprehension education for the very first time.
It is anticipated that Koreans will be able to learn English and others will be able to learn Korean in a more simple and effective manner.
The newly-developed reading comprehension AI tutor technology by the research group helps learners discover English reading and listening based on textbooks, similar to private teachers. Also, it asks questions regarding the contents of the textbook, conducts dialogues related to the content, and assesses the responses of learners.
Already, ETRI has come up with an AI-based conversational foreign language education technology and offered services. EBS’s AI PengTalk has been employed with ETRI’s pronunciation evaluation, English speech recognition, and free conversation processing technology.
This service has been utilized as a public education English-speaking learning service for elementary schools across the globe. Besides, the same technology has been employed by King Sejong Institute Foundation’s ‘King Sejong Institute AI Korean Tutor’ to offer chances to learn Korean.
AI technology for reading comprehension education has been employed with pronunciation evaluation technology, non-native speaker speech recognition technology, machine translation technology, and dialogue processing technology for reading education that has been developed by ETRI.
As far as text listening and reading are concerned, when the learner listens to and reads the text read by the reading AI tutor, the learner’s pronunciation is assessed, and feedback on the pronunciation is offered.
I hope that AI technology for reading will be of great help to native and foreign learners who want to study reading with native English teachers.
Lee Yoon-Geun, Director, ETRI Artificial Intelligence Research Center, National Research Council of Science and Technology
The research group is also planning to come up with a technology for the automatic assessment of essays that have been written by learners concerning reading content. Also, it will continue its follow-up research to offer AI tutor services that help with listening, reading, speaking, as well as writing.
At the time of the project, the scientists were able to accomplish the following: 35 patents, 21 technology transfers, 41 published papers, and the adoption of 2 international standards, among others.
Journal Reference
Huang, J-X., et al. (2022) DIRECT: Toward Dialogue-Based Reading Comprehension Tutoring. IEEE Xplore. doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3233224.