Computer Sciences and Information Technology
Title : | English Gyani - An intelligent assistant for tutoring English via learner-tutor interactions |
Area of research : | Computer Sciences and Information Technology |
Focus area : | Interactive learning module for English grammar |
Principal Investigator : | Dr Prasanta Kumar Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) Bangalore |
Timeline Start Year : | 2019 |
Contact info : | prasantg@iisc.ac.in |
Details
Executive Summary : | The project 'English Gyani' aims at improving one's English comprehension and reading skills with guidance in vernacular to cater to the increasing demand of English learning particularly for employment and promotions of individuals under-resourced to avail English learning materials or schools. The lessons in 'English Gyani' are categorized to improve the vocabulary, grammar and sentence construction skills as parts of English comprehension. On the other hand, the lessons related to reading skills are based on factors including quality of speaking English phonemes, usage of stress and intonation for conveying appropriate meaning while speaking English as well as fluency and expressiveness in speaking. 'English Gyani' will be an intelligent learning platform where the learner can interact using their voice to learn different lessons similar to a typical classroom setup in spoken English training school. This, in turn, brings forth the need for developing robust ASR systems and algorithms to accurately decipher the parameters related to the fluency and pronunciation ability of the learners in an automatic manner. A key feature of 'English Gyani', unlike a typical spoken English training school, is its ability to predict and provide feedback in a personalized manner to each learner. The development of 'English Gyani' involves several steps including voice data collection for developing an automatic speech recognition system. It also requires voice data from spoken English experts. The involvement of English teachers is essential to develop a systematic and thorough set of lessons that could cater to the need of the vocabulary and usage of English related to target users. A critical component is the collection of voice samples following the lessons from a large pool of English learners along with their pronunciation ratings by English experts. The final step of the project involves studying the benefit of "English Gyani' on its users through ICTs such as smartphones, computers. |
Total Budget (INR): | 64,21,800 |
Achievements : | Progress in the following aspects has been made:
• Module/Lesson design, app development including that for recording learners’ data, experts voice data recording, and literature survey.
• Design of the lessons for 1) English vocabulary usage, 2) usage of English grammar, and 3) meaningful English sentence construction
• Design of phoneme, stress, intonation, and sentence lessons for spoken English
• Setting up the server facility to enable voice recordings of different lessons in a crowdsourced manner. |
Publications : | 4 |
Organizations involved
