An intelligent tutoring system for deaf learners of written English

Abstract

This paper describes progress toward a prototype implementation of a tool which aims to improve literacy in deaf high school and college students who are native (or near native) signers of American Sign Language (ASL). We envision a system that will take a piece of text written by a deaf student, analyze that text for grammatical errors, and engage that student in a tutorial dialogue, enabling the student to generate appropriate corrections to the text. A strong focus of this work is to develop a system which adapts this process to the knowledge level and learning strengths of the user and which has the flexibility to engage in multi-modal, multi-lingual tutorial instruction utilizing both English and the native language of the user.