the terence fp7 project s&t goals and results for schools and beyond

Rosella Gennari!!KRDB - CS Faculty - UniBZ!!

http://www.terenceproject.eu

TERENCE !its S&T goals and potential impact for beneficiaries

http://www.terenceproject.eu

© R. Gennari, LUB, <[email protected]> TERENCE 3rd review meeting, 27th Nov 2013, l’Aquila

Outlinetwo stories from the DoW book

Chapter 1 What TERENCE has done for its 4 S&T goals

Chapter 2 What TERENCE has done for its beneficiaries and its potential impact

mailto:[email protected]


characteristation of learnersFirst of all, TERENCE will provide a refined characterisation of poor comprehenders in regard to the TERENCE stories and reasoning games.

The TERENCE S&T1 goal

WP1:%user%requirements

WP7:%evalua3on



The TERENCE S&T1 goal

It will analyse the domain knowledge of (causal-)temporal representation, reasoning and visualisation for and with poor comprehenders.

User requirements will be essential in producing (and classifying) adequate stories and games, and in structuring the conceptual model of the ALS.

characteristation of learners


WP7:%evalua3on

WP2:%story,%game,%GUI%and%ALS%design

WP6:%GUI%and%ALS%design

The requirements will thus contribute t o s h a p e t h e guidance mechanism o f the TERENCE ALS.

S&T1 will require a strong cross-disciplinary effort, starting from the available domain knowledge, and building on research results from medicine, cognitive and educational psychology.



The TERENCE S&T goalevaluation tasks and guidelinesTERENCE will design and assess novel evaluation tasks of text comprehension

⧂The policemen fell asleep after leaving the office ⧂The policemen fell asleep before leaving the office ⧂The policemen fell asleep when going out from the office

2


WP7:%evalua3on



The TERENCE S&T goalevaluation tasks and guidelinesand, in particular, novel metrics for the reasoning complexity of the TERENCE games [and stories], that are common to UK and Italy.

The results of the evaluations will allow us to define novel evaluation guidelines for those in charge of evaluating educational comprehension tools for children.

metrics/indices guidelines

stories Coese D2.2 TR

games generation algos D2.3

2


WP7:%evalua3on

WP2:%story,%game,%GUI%and%ALS%design

WP6:%GUI%and%ALS%design



The TERENCE S&T goalAI technologies and toolsTERENCE will also study scientific questions arising in automated understanding of stories for novice comprehenders, in English and in Italian.In particular, TERENCE will study and contribute to automated reasoning, possibly with explanatory feedback, that is adequate to poor comprehenders and their educators.

3

relation type

if with signal...

else if deduced...


WP7:%evalua3on

WP3:%story%annota3on

WP4:%game%design%II,%txt%game%

genera3on

WP2:%game%design%I

WP4:%game%genera3on%process%design



The TERENCE S&T goalAI technologies and tools

The automation of TERENCE (via automated annotations and automated reasoning) will help reduce the development costs, and allow researchers to concentrate on the design of the higher-level ITS models.

As for the automation itself, TERENCE aims at improving on:

T1. novel natural language technologies and tools for story annotation, in English and Italian,

T2. temporal automated reasoning tools that can interact with the annotations of stories developed with the annotation tools,

T3. reasoning tasks and tools, so as to enhance temporal and causal-temporal knowledge, acquisition and automation of inference skills on texts.

Estimates of construction time indicate that the development of an effective ALS can be costly and time consuming.

3

learning(material(semi,automated(development

WP3:(story(annota7on

WP4:(txt(game(genera7on

WP5:(illustra7on(of(

visuals

WP6:(composi7on(of(txt(and(visuals



The TERENCE S&T goalmodular and reusable architecture

The difficulty in sharing components among different designers has also impeded the smooth design and development of ALSs. It is often the case that ALSs are written in many different programming languages that are incompatible. Frequently, implementers intertwine the components into one monolithic system.

Modelling the ALS conceptual models (adaptation, domain, environment, student) with ontologies, and developing the components of the adaptation engine as web services will ensure the highest level of interoperability and reusability.

ALS LayerGUI Layer

Learner

EducatorExpert

Learner GUI

Expert GUI

Persistence Layer

OpenRDF

UserManager

OpenRDF

StoryManager

OpenRDF

GameManager

OpenRDF

VisualisationManagerillustrations

NPL

Reasoner

AdaptiveEngine

Visualisation

��

Reasoning Module

AnnotationModule

VisualisationModule

4

WP2:%ALS%design

WP6:%ALS%development

WP3:%story%annota:on

WP6:%visualisa:on

WP4:%txt%game%genera:on

Educators will be able to adapt and reuse stories, illustrations and smart games produced by others, which will promote collaborative learning. More in general, the TERENCE web services can be reused within other collaborative web-based environments. The semantic web service architecture of TERENCE will also contribute to reducing development costs. In brief, TERENCE will contribute to the general

advancement o f ALS architectures on account of: its modularity and the reusability of its modules, developed as semantic web services.



Outline

Chapter 1 What TERENCE has done for its 4 S&T goals

Chapter 2 What TERENCE has done for its bene6iciaries and its potential impact

two stories from the DoW book



For learnerswhat we did in words

Keywords: improved reading; appetite for reading he usage of the TERENCE adaptive learning system (ALS), with adequate learning material and GUI, calibrated by an intervention plan designed by experts,

improved reading comprehension The TERENCE intervention may have also stimulated its learners' organic functioning and global cognition (e.g., visual memory, global-deductive reasoning, attention). Consequently, the longer-term impact of TERENCE may be by far larger: a potential increase in the communicative and relational competencies of its learners for communicating with peers and adults (parents and others), as well as in their self-esteem.

For instance, at the conclusion of the intervention in schools, a number of children asked to continue reading the TERENCE books at home, because they wanted to finish their stories. No better result could be hoped for the end of a project that, in its infancy, wished to nurture a desire for reading.



For learnerswhat we did in pics



For educators and parentswhat we did in wordsKeywords: novel teaching; off-the-shelf open learning material; guidelines and tools for creating adequate material Our findings also suggest the possibility of strengthening the paper- and-pencil didactic activities with the adoption of technological supports, both in an individual setting and in a social context (e.g., in the classroom). In view of that, The TERENCE ALS with its learning material and learner GUI promises to improve the quality of work of educators and families

by integrating classical teaching activities with novel learning experiences and methodologies that are flexible, since they are based on adequate stories and games that are provided in an adaptive fashion, and effective, since TERENCE improved reading comprehension.

Moreover, the use of the TERENCE authoring tool and guidelines, in particular for stories and games, obviates the need for educators to find adequate learning material, render texts adequate to poor comprehenders or deaf children, or even to manually create complex games [...] and track the progression of learners Thus, for educators, TERENCE is a time saving and cost saving tool, facilitating the adaptation of the material to learners and enabling its creation, as well as the automated generation of games out of any text.



For education and psychology actors

what we did in wordsKeywords: remediation; large-scale comparative analysis; evaluation tasks Potentially, TERENCE entire ALS, learning material and guidelines or authoring tool might be also used in

remediation settings where clinical psychologists may control in a non-intrusive manner (e.g., crucial for autism) the effectiveness of the remediation, and the stimulation can be also delivered at home (in a more familiar environment) for longer periods (in addition to the clinical activities).

Moreover, TERENCE did the first a large scale comparative analysis of the linguistic and cognitive profiles of hearing and deaf poor readers, in UK and Italy. It significantly improves our current understanding of the specific factors causing reading comprehension problems in the two groups of learners.

New evaluation tasks for the assessment of children's understanding of causal and temporal linguistic relations were designed and tested in two languages by large scale studies.



For education actorswhat we did in pics



For researchers and technologistswhat we did in words

Keywords: networking; scientific events; commercial exploitation As a natural consequence of evaluation results and awareness arousal, TERENCE ideas concept and vision have already been

taken up by related initiatives in Europe or senior colleagues. Examples are: the Linked Open Data (LOD) European project, in which the TERENCE learning material was published as open data, and where the annotation and reasoning modules were advertised; the MUSE European project that took up the TERENCE annotation language, methodologies and findings for NLP; the DARE research project (http://www.inf.unibz.it/dare), financed by the Province of Bozen-Bolzano, that took up TERENCE stories and game framework for co-designing games with primary-school classes. Others are reported in the TERENCE dissemination and exploitation reports.

Moreover, the TERENCE Consortium was also active in promoting TERENCE findings in research venues whether by organising events such as the evidence-based and user-centred TEL workshop series, counting already 3 successful issues, or by participating in key TEL conferences such as ICALT.


http://www.inf.unibz.it/dare


For researchers and technologistswhat we did in pics



For policy makerswhat we did in shortKeywords: awareness rising; networking with school stakeholders Last but not least, TERENCE researchers

got in touch with several policy-makers in particular in the education sector. Meetings were organised, for instance, in L'Aquila Province and with the Education Body of the

Province of Bozen-Bolzano for raising awareness of the problem of text comprehension that, in particular in Italy, is not recognised as a special development disease.Besides raising awareness of the problem, such meetings allowed consortium members to disseminate the TERENCE results and explain the novelty and potentiality of the approach of TERENCE for schools, mixing technology with traditional interventions, and visuo-perceptual skills for reasoning about stories for nowadays learners.

Support letters and agreements were signed for using TERENCE in traditional schools, some of which received ICT facilities for TERENCE.



S&T1characterisation

End of stories from the DoW book

WP7: evaluations

UnivAQ

WP2: story and game design

LUH

WP1: learner requirementsUniPD+UnivAQ

ucd+ebd


WP7: evaluations

UnivAQ

ucd+ebd

learning material semi-automated development

WP4: generation

LUB

WP3: annotation

KUL

WP5: illustration

MOME

WP6: visualisation

LUB

WP6: ALS development

USAL

learning material semi-automated development

WP4: generation

LUB

WP3: annotation

KUL

WP6: visualisation

LUB

WP2: ALS designLUH

WP7: evaluations

UnivAQ

WP2: AE rules and ALS design

LUH


ucd+ebd

WP6: ALS development

USAL

S&T2guidelines S&T3

AI for generation

S&T4modular !& reusable

Impact5 beneficiaries


The Endwith

TERENCE books for X-mas time

for remembering its best stories

THE TERENCE BOOK 2THE TERENCE BOOK 1

and forgetting others (sorry, Pablo!)

the terence fp7 project s&t goals and results for schools and beyond

Technology