CSLR International Summer Workshop Agenda

 
June 30 – July 25, 2003

University of Colorado

Center for Spoken Language Research

 
Sponsored by the Center for Spoken Language Research and grants from the National Science Foundation and Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities

Objectives: Workshop attendees will obtain an understanding of the tools and technologies being developed at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) to facilitate the design of Interactive Books designed to teach reading and learning from text. Participants will work with CSLR staff to port these tools to their own language and to build Interactive Book prototypes during the workshop period. Attendees will also be asked to give talks describing their own research projects and interests. Post-workshop collaborations on advancing language technologies across new languages are anticipated. Attendees of the workshop will be provided CSLR tools and technologies in the form of binary executable programs to sustain future research collaboration and other non-commercial use purposes.

Location: The CSLR International Workshop will take place at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR). A shared office space with computer access will be provided to attendees.  Meetings will take place in room C181 (large classroom) at CSLR.  CSLR is located at 3215 Marine Street in the RL6 building of east campus at the University of Colorado.

Time: We will meet from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM each day of the workshop. Lunch breaks are one hour daily (12:30 PM to 1:30 PM). There are several nearby restaurants that are walking distance from CSLR. The workshop organizers will not reimburse lunch expenses. Attendees are welcome to explore the nearby community or bring a lunch to eat in the CSLR common area.

Excursions: Two excursions and a July 4th (U.S. Independence Day) cookout have been planned during this workshop. We hope that you will enjoy the summer beauty of Colorado and use this as an opportunity to get to know each other. Two excursions have been planned: one to Colorado Springs and one to Rocky Mountain National Park. Colorado Springs is located about 1.5 hours south of Boulder and is home to the Garden of the Gods (a natural rock formation) and the United States Air Force Academy.

 

Proposed Workshop Schedule

[WEEK 1] 

Monday, June 30th

Learning Goals: Participants will learn about each other, receive an overview of CSLR and the Colorado Literacy Tutor, and gain hands-on experience with reading tutors and interactive books.

AM: - (Ron)

·Workshop Objectives
·Introduction of Attendees
·What is needed to author an interactive book in another language?
·CSLR Overview
·Break (30 minutes)
·Colorado Literacy Tutor: A Vision for the Future

PM: - (Dave, Sarel)

·Review of agenda
·Visible speech homework assignment
·Overview of Interactive Books & Tutors
·Break
·Participants play with the tutors and author a book

Tuesday, July 1st

Learning Goals: Participants will become intimately familiar with all aspects and features of Interactive Books, and will author a significant (2-3 page) book on their own.

AM: - (Dave, Taylor)

·Hands-on book authoring

PM:

·1:30-2:30 Presentation: Susan Duncan, Univ. of Chicago/Wright State University
·2:30-3:00 Break
·3:00-5:00 ISSS office check-in 

Wednesday, July 2nd

Learning Goals: Participants will become familiar with CSLR technologies, including speech recognition, speech synthesis, language recognition/generation, dialogue management, real-time web retrieval, Interactive Books, face tracking, and animation.

AM: - (Bryan)

·CU Communicator

PM: - (Terry)

·Logistics
·Reimbursed Expenses
·Excursions, Q&A - (Sarel, Nattawut)
·Interactive Books software architecture

Thursday, July 3rd

Learning Goals: Participants will be come familiar with CU Animate, facial animation, face tracking, and the integration of face tracking and animation.

AM: - (Jiyong)

·Facial animation (general overview)
·Break
·CU Animate motion capture system

PM: - (Jie, Sarel)

·CU Animate authoring tools
·Break
·Face tracking demo
·Integration of face tracking and animation

Friday, July 4th

PARTY PARTY PARTY!
BBQ at Ron’s 1:00 - (Transportation will be provided)

[WEEK 2]

Monday, July 7th

Learning Goals: Participants will become familiar with the pedagogy and theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the Colorado Literacy Tutor and its components.

AM: - (Barb Wise)

·Interactive Books and Tutors: Pedagogy & Scientifically Based Reading Research
·Break
·Developing stories and questions, examining existing stories

PM: - (Scott)

·Participatory design philosophy and development activities
·Break - (Taylor)
·Development of interactive books (activities underway this summer)

Tuesday, July 8th

Learning Goals: Participants will become familiar with the managed learning environment (MLE) and the current status of the Colorado Literacy Tutor project. In addition, participants will become familiar with speech recognition issues in general, and the basics of Sonic in particular.

AM: - (Sarel)

·Current status of CLT: September deployment
·Managed Learning Environment demo, as well as plans for improvement.
·Books, tutors, individual study plans
·Break - (Lynn)
·Assessment

 
PM: - (Bryan)

·Sonic LVCSR (1 hour)
·Speech Recognition Overview
·Kids’ Speech Challenges
·CSLR Sonic from the Ground Up
·Unsolved Problems and Research Roadmap                      

Wednesday, July 9th

            EXCURSION #1: Colorado Springs

Thursday, July 10th

Learning Goals: Participants will use Sonic hands-on and become intimately familiar with the system, digit recognition and finite-state grammars.

AM: - (Bryan)

·Sonic User Manual (participants will read)
·Digit Recognition Tutorial
·Discussion

PM: - (Bryan)

·Simple demo of live-mode interface to Sonic
·Writing finite-state grammars in Sonic
·Hands-on test, Q&A

Friday, July 11th

Learning Goals: Participants will learn the ins and outs of porting Sonic to a new language and will begin working in teams.

AM: - (Bryan)

·Porting Sonic to a New Language (overview)
·Determine Phonetic Symbols for Target Languages
·Decision Tree Splitting Questions for Target Languages
·Phonetic Alignment Mapping Tutorial (bootstrap from English)

PM: - (Bryan)

·Language Dependent Lexicon formatting for Sonic (teams will work to complete this task)

[WEEK 3]

Monday, July 14th

Learning Goals: Participants will learn about task-specific vs. task-independent parsing, and will become familiar with Phoenix and how to write Phoenix grammars.

AM: - (Wayne)

·Phoenix
·Task-specific parsing

PM: - (Wayne)

·Shallow semantic parsing
·Task-independent parsing

Tuesday, July 15th

Learning Goals: Participants will learn how to write a new application that interfaces with Sonic.

 
AM: - (Bryan)

·Live Microphone Interface to Sonic
·Sonic API and libraries
·Writing a new application which uses Sonic libraries

            PM: - (Bryan)

·Presentation: Ingrid Kirschning, Universidad de Los Americas
·Roundtable discussion: TBA
·Finish work on Sonic. 

Wednesday, July 16th

EXCURSION #2: Rocky Mountain National Park

Thursday, July 17th

Learning Goals: Participants will continue to learn about porting Sonic to a new language and begin working independently toward retraining Sonic in their language.

AM: - (Bryan)

·Tutorial on Porting to a new language (Turkish Example)
·Participants to begin independent work towards retraining Sonic in their own language.  Assistance will be provided to walk through the issues in setting up the corpora, writing scripts, evaluating performance. Goals: Spanish, French, German, and Italian.

PM: - (Bryan)

·Participants continue independent work towards retraining Sonic in their own language.
·4:00-5:00 Presentation: Stefania Biscetti, University of Siena

Friday, July 18th

Learning Goals: Participants will become familiar with Latent Semantic Analysis and Summary Street.

AM:

·Presentation: Rodolfo Delmonte, Università Ca' Foscari
·Teams will summarize work and provide feedback on Sonic tutorials: How can we make them better?

PM: - (Dave)

·Latent Semantic Analysis - (Eileen, Nina)
·Overview of Summary Street activities in CLT
·Summary Street hands-on demo

[WEEK 4] 

Monday, July 21st

·Start projects

Tuesday, July 22nd

AM:

·Work on projects

PM: - (Ron)

·Roundtable discussion: international collaboration
·Continue working on projects 

Wednesday, July 23rd

·Work on projects

Thursday, July 24th

·Work on projects

Friday, July 25th

AM:

·Practice installation session

PM:

·Project reports
·Workshop feedback
·Additional plans for collaboration