Robot teaches English as Second Language

StephenW

Robot teaches English as Second LanguageJanette Williams, Staff Writer
Posted: 08/26/2011 06:33:10 PM PDT



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Pasadena City College adjunct assistant Professor Ron Chang Lee displays Michelle, his English as...

PASADENA - Say "How do you do" to Mike and Michelle, face-to-face tutors for English learners.     They'll correct your grammar, answer questions, converse on a variety of topics, be there 24/7, and won't charge a dime.     
And they're doing very well, thank-you.     
The on-screen "English Tutor" interactive robots and their creator, adjunct Professor Ron Chang Lee of Pasadena City College, are heading to England's Exeter University in October as one of four finalists in the 2011 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence.     
"I always wanted to create something to help students, like a tutor," said Lee, who has taught English as a Second Language at PCC since 1991.     
"It's a talking robot, so (students) are not afraid of asking anything," Lee said. Interacting with a robot is less intimidating for ESL students than conversing with a professor, he said.     
"A community college like PCC has many international students, and first they have to listen to English, to communicate with their professors," he said. "So the first year they have to take ESL."     
Just 15 minutes a day with Mike or Michelle can really help, he said.     
"It's just like having a native speaker - they correct mistakes, spelling and grammatical errors. You type in `You is a good teacher,' and the robot corrects you. `Say you are, never say you is."'     
Lee's ESL site started out as a class project in 1994 at the University of Illinois, where he began studying

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in 1992 after a career teaching English in China. He followed a master's in ESL with a Ph.D. in educational technology in 1998.     Over the years, the program has grown more sophisticated, he said, now with robots able to chat on 25 topics in 2,000 available conversations.     
"You can ask `What is the capital of any countries, any states of the U.S.?' `Who is the president or king of each country?"' Lee said. "It knows how many countries in the world, the population of major countries, the longest river, and the highest mountain."     
The robots can detect the 800 most common errors learning English-speakers make, Lee said, and know all the irregular verbs, provide different tenses, explain grammatical terms and give advice on how to learn English.     
They can get personal, too.     
"Are you married?" Lee typed in. "Not at the moment," Michelle replied, maybe inviting more questions.     
He's steadily improving the program, Lee said.     
"The robots are learning from their mistakes. People are chatting with them, and I can see all the questions they asked," he said. "I am training the robots."     
Miranda Yousef, director of a planned "Untitled Smartbot Project" documentary about the Loebner Prize, said Lee brings something different to the table.     
"Dr. Lee's a very intriguing character because, unlike most people who enter, who are computer programers or developers, he's an ESL teacher," she said. "His goal for the `chatbot' is to eventually develop a free on-line tutoring system that can be used world-wide - it's a wonderfully different approach."     
Lee said he used artificial intelligence software to develop his site and in 1996 got a $30,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation.     
He won $250 for making it to the Loebner's top four, and a chance to win the $4,000 top award.     
The financial reward isn't huge, Lee said, but the prestige could give a boost to his efforts to raise funding.     
"There's not a lot of investment these days" in artificial intelligence, Lee said. "Yes, I'm disappointed, I've found (raising money) hard to do."     
He'd like to work on fixing Mike and Michelle's limitations, Lee said.     
Users still have to type in their questions, rather than speak, although he said users with speech recognition software can talk into the microphone.     
"But again, speech recognition is not perfect," he said. "It sometimes makes mistakes, especially when the user has a foreign accent."     
The computer-synthesized voices Mike and Michelle use are "getting closer" to actual human voices, Lee said, but they still sound artificial. And, except for welcoming users to the site, he has turned the voices off to save money, he said.     
"Later on, if I get a grant that's big enough, I'm going to do an upgrade makes it possible to hear the voice," he said. "Students really like to hear the voice."     
Lee said his rong-chang.com site has become the top ESL destination on the web; combined with his eslfast.com, Lee said, he gets about 11,500,000 monthly hits and 800,000 unique visitors.     
His next step is finding a way to make the robots "think" before answering a question, tailoring the response to the user.     
It won't cost as much as people might think, Lee said.     
"It will not require as much investment as IBM has put into their `Watson,"' he said, referring to the super-robot who beat out the human champions on "Jeopardy" in February. "But it can certainly compete in a general knowledge test on TV."     
[email protected]     
626-578-6300, ext. 4482     


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