English Gyani - An intelligent assistant for tutoring English via learner-tutor interactions
Summary
The proposed 'English Gyani' aims at improving one's English comprehension and reading skill with guidance in vernacular to cater to the
increasing demand of English learning particularly for employment and promotions of individuals under-resourced to avail English learning
materials or schools. The lessons in 'English Gyani' are categorized to improve the vocabulary, grammar and sentence construction skills as
parts of English comprehension. On the other hand, the lessons related to reading skills are based on factors including quality of speaking
English phonemes, usage of stress and intonation for conveying appropriate meaning while speaking English as well as fluency and expressiveness
in speaking. 'English Gyani' will be an intelligent learning platform where the learner can interact using their voice to learn different lessons
similar to a typical classroom setup in spoken English training school. This, in turn, brings forth the needs for developing robust ASR systems
and algorithms to accurately decipher the parameters related to fluency and pronunciation ability of the learners in an automatic manner. A key feature of 'English Gyani', unlike a typical spoken English training school, is its ability to predict and provide feedback in a personalized manner to each learner. The development of 'English Gyani' involves several steps including voice data collection for developing automatic speech recognition system. It also requires voice data from spoken English experts. Involvement of English teacher is essential to develop a systematic and thorough set of lessons that could cater to the need of the vocabulary and usage of English related to target users. A critical component is the collection of voice samples following the lessons from a large pool of English learners along with their pronunciation rating by English experts. Final step of the project involves studying the benefit of "English Gyani' on its users through ICTs such as smartphones, computers.
