ABSTRACT
We propose an Arabic talking face called Badr to teach the language vocabulary for young students under COVID-19 pandemic. Badr is built on the previous talking face Baldi (e.g., an American English talking face) with many enhancements in interaction and words pronunciation. It can complement the work of instructors who can get tired and bored when teaching online for long hours. It can pronounce standard Arabic vocabulary accurately and interact with learners in natural manner. Listening and observing Badr improve the learners' ability to understand speech in a noisy background. We tested Badr with Qatar University students, and we show its effectiveness and usefulness in introducing smoothly new vocabulary. Badr can act as an independent tutor for different categories of learners including those with learning difficulties, slow learners, and non-Arabic speaking learners. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Enriching the script of a story with visual aids is an effective approach for promoting language learning and literacy development for young children and learners. In this paper, we propose a new system, that can generate short Arabic stories with generated images that accurately represent the story, scene and context of the given input. We use a text generation technique with a text-to-image synthesis network and minimize the human intervention. We build a corpus of Arabic stories with vocabulary and visualizations. The obtained results with various generative models to create text-image contents show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The system can be used in education and assist the instructors to build stories on different domains. It can be used in distance learning to deliver online tutorials during COVID-19. © 2021 ACM.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 imposed a new paradigm in education especially in elementary schools. Children are no longer able to go regularly to schools as normal. They should then rely mainly on themselves to learn and acquire knowledge. The Understand My World app is a new technological solution that allows children to learn new Arabic vocabularies interactively and independently using their smart phones or tablets (i.e., iPad, iPhone). They can use the devices' camera and microphone to explore the world, understand spoken words, and read written language properly. Images captured by the camera are recognized, labeled, and defined in both speech and writing. Children can also speak into their device to record their speech and listen to it. They can address questions and receive answers. The app then presents the dictated words in both spoken and written form. Using the required Internet connection, the interface automatically provides exceedingly accurate image and speech recognition, all while preserving the participants' anonymity. We use two AI platforms namely Clarifai and Houndify. The application is designed to be intuitive and seamless to use, which makes it very attractive to children to learn through multimedia. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The education of children with learning difficulties is a challenging task especially during COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, these children need to go regularly to specialized school, receive focused education, and interact with teachers to learn. Instructors allocate important time to teach them and use different approaches including, attractive stories, tangible photos, physical plays, sites visit, awards and gifts. However, these modes of education become nowadays very hard to achieve as instructors are teaching from homes or offices through the Internet. They cannot have face-to-face meetings with children in classrooms. The major issue is how to find the necessary materials to teach them the new Arabic vocabularies and explain their meanings in an effective manner. Instructors can use textbooks, online libraries and search engines looking for Arabic educational resources while most of them are in English or in other western languages. The process is very long, time consuming and does not fill-in the gap. We propose to build a new educational large-scale multimedia Arabic corpus that provides thousands of vocabularies and chunks associated with best representative images. The instructors can use the bimodal corpus directly during the learning sessions to explain new Arabic words through images. It currently covers the animals' domain and contains thousands of well-structured and interconnected entities. Instructors can collaborate in enhancing the corpus by adding new materials through a web-based platform and build then rich source of learning materials. © 2021 IEEE.