Ethel Ong

• De La Salle University

Advances in natural language processing techniques enhance the capabilities of conversational agents to process input text and generate fluent responses in various genre. In the educational setting, these conversational agents can function as learning companions to promote peer learning, enhance social interaction, and motivate collaborative behavi...

Background Despite global interest in the interface of Algorithmically-driven writing tools (ADWTs) and academic integrity, empirical data considering educators' perspectives on the challenges, benefits, and policies of ADWTs use remain scarce. Aim This study responds to calls for empirical investigation concerning the affordances and encumbrances...

Global reports indicate a steady increase in the number of people who are facing mental health concerns. Among those affected are students who struggle with balancing the demands of a hybrid learning environment. Recent studies are emerging on the use of chatbots as an accessible technology-based alternative to help address the challenges faced by...

Interactive storytelling uses digital media to engage readers to interact with the author’s narrative through key decision points in the story. This has been shown to be an effective learning resource in teaching across various disciplines. Designing interactive storytelling systems typically require handcrafted storytelling knowledge and branching...

Research on the use of conversational agents or chatbots to provide alternative and accessible mental health interventions has gained much interest in recent years. Designed to engage human users through natural and empathetic conversations, these chatbots have shown their potential applications in pre-emptive healthcare that emphasizes the importa...

This chapter employed qualitative and case study approaches to elicit valuable insights from 19 De La Salle University tertiary teachers' use of digital educational technology and AnimoSpace in addressing the set of challenges posed by online learning environments and the issues of equity and inclusion. Analysis of interviews and AnimoSpace statist...

The prolonged lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a dramatic increase in the number of mental health concerns in the community. Students are among those vastly affected. Their socio-economic and financial conditions add challenges to their academic difficulty and work-life balance that can fuel issues related to mental health and well-be...

Readability assessment is the process of identifying the level of ease or difficulty of a certain piece of text for its intended audience. Approaches have evolved from the use of arithmetic formulas to more complex pattern-recognizing models trained using machine learning algorithms. While using these approaches provide competitive results, limited...

Conversational agents can be perceived to be more human-like if they possess empathy or the ability to understand and share feelings with their users. Studies have also showed improvement in user engagement on systems that can exhibit emotional skills. Empathy can be expressed through language. In this paper, a pre-trained neural conversational lan...

In order to ensure quality and effective learning, fluency, and comprehension, the proper identification of the difficulty levels of reading materials should be observed. In this paper, we describe the development of automatic machine learning-based readability assessment models for educational Filipino texts using the most diverse set of linguisti...

Students are vulnerable to health problems due to numerous stressors and overwhelming pressure at home and in school. With the rapid development in AI technologies, there are many opportunities to develop tools that can assist students affected by these problems. Chatbots can serve as a platform for individuals to share their emotions, gain motivat...

Assessing the proper difficulty levels of reading materials or texts in general is the first step towards effective comprehension and learning. In this study, we improve the conventional methodology of automatic readability assessment by incorporating the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) of ranked texts as an additional post-processing technique to furt...

Readability formulas consider word familiarity as one of the factors for predicting the readability of children’s books. Word familiarity is dependent on the frequency in which the words are encountered in daily reading. Often referred to as “sight words”, developing effective recognition of these high-frequency words can assist young readers to de...

Conversational agents that engage children in collaborative storytelling need a collection of domain knowledge to formulate its responses. However, the current manual processes of collecting, annotating and extracting data from a corpus of unstructured text is time-consuming that often impedes the population of a knowledge base. An alternative is t...

Proper identification of grade levels of children's reading materials is an important step towards effective learning. Recent studies in readability assessment for the English domain applied modern approaches in natural language processing (NLP) such as machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the process. There is also a need to extract the co...

Voice assistants in mobile devices and smart speakers offer the potential of conversational agents as storytelling peers of children, especially those who may have limited proficiency in spelling and grammar. Despite their prevalence, however, the built-in automatic speech recognition features of voice interfaces have been shown to perform poorly o...

Storytelling can develop children's emotional intelligence when they are asked to freely talk about their emotions. While parents are responsible for teaching emotional intelligence, studies in using affective technologies to help people become aware of their emotions have also been explored. In this paper, we investigate the opportunity of this te...

Proper identification of grade levels of children's reading materials is an important step towards effective learning. Recent studies in readability assessment for the English domain applied modern approaches in natural language processing (NLP) such as machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the process. There is also a need to extract the co...

Child-agent collaborative storytelling can be facilitated through text and voice interfaces. Voice interfaces are more intuitive and closely resemble the way people usually relate to one another. This may be attributed to the colloquial characteristics of everyday conversations that do away with rigid linguistic structures typically present in text...

Storytelling can be used to raise awareness on healthcare practices among young children. Combined with interactive environments, children can be given a virtual simulated world to learn about the effects of practicing good healthcare habits with the guidance of virtual peers. In this paper, we present Sarah, a virtual peer that shares interactive...

Automatic text summarization is mostly used to provide quick access to relevant information from a huge volume of documents and news, especially from online document search facilities. Summarizing fictional stories, however, may pose some challenges for the machine since important information can appear in unexpected places in the text. A prerequis...

People thrive in storytelling as a means of sharing their experiences with one another and learning about the world through narratives. With the advancement of technology, social media platforms have become a common medium for people to recount and to share stories about their life events anytime and anywhere as they happen. Automated story generat...

Large amount of user-generated data are posted online in social media platforms, including user preferences, dining and leisure activities, events, news and personal blogs. This resulted in varying efforts to process social media data using NLP and ML algorithms for topic classification, sentiment analysis and detection, and events classification....

Students may progress slowly or even abandon an assigned reading task due to lack of interest which causes boredom, poor reading comprehension which causes discouragement, and disengagement from the reading material. Various studies have reported that these negative academic moods can be mediated through having meaningful conversations during readi...

Storytelling is both an entertaining and an educational activity for children. It allows them to express their thoughts about the world around them, while learning about language, values and interacting with others. Thus, storytelling is utilized not only at home but also in the school environment to engage children in sharing information about thi...

Text summarization involves the identification and extraction of sentences from long documents to produce shorter-length summaries that enable readers to have quick access to relevant information. In this paper, we describe our automated text summarizer that is capable of extracting essential information from research papers regarding various treat...

People use social media, in particular Facebook, to share stories about themselves and the things that interest them. However, a Facebook user's posts by themselves cannot provide a concise narrative of events to tell a complete life story. Story generators can be designed to utilize these events extracted from posts that users share about themselv...

Storytelling is a common activity that people engage in to share and exchange information about their everyday life events. Children in particular find storytelling entertaining as they learn about their world and even share their own stories. Virtual agents are gaining popularity as conversational agents who can engage with their human users in a...

Interactive Storytelling systems combine natural language processing techniques with gameplay to provide a narrative-based environment where a player’s decisions can alter the flow of the game. This type of simulated story world setup can facilitate the teaching and learning of concepts in different domains, such as the case method. A case method i...

Children encounter more difficulty in writing than in sharing their stories verbally. This difficulty may be due to the need for them to organize their thoughts and express them in the written language. A software agent can be designed to mimic the support given by a human teacher or peer, such as asking questions, giving directives, and recommendi...

Readers experience various emotions while reading, which may affect their overall enjoyment and comprehension of the material. The current work presents a study on brainwaves or EEG signals and their association to emotions while a person is reading literary fiction. EEG data from 32 participants, aged 18 years old and above, were collected with th...

Geometry is a mandatory subject for secondary school students, where they learn geometric figures and their properties, and the axioms, postulates and theorems involving them. A key topic in Geometry class is proving, where learners are required to derive and prove a certain property is true based from the given properties and by using various axio...

Case studies are narratives of a specific real-life or imagined situation. They are used as teaching tools to help students practice their critical decision-making skills. Interactive Storytelling has the potential to augment the case method for business education by allowing for the dynamic generation of new cases based on the player’s actions. De...

Stories are inhabited by multiple characters who interact in the story world to achieve their goals. For computer systems to generate such stories, we propose the use of agents to model the needs and behavior, as well as formulate the individual plan of action of the different story characters. A central agent, the story planner, uses a simple turn...

People with social phobia are characterized by a fear of being scrutinized, while people with agora-phobia have a fear of situations where escape may be difficult such as being in a crowded area. One way to support them is with the use of virtual reality technologies. Virtual reality (VR) allows people to easily step into and immerse themselves in...

Narrative-based environments utilize various forms of knowledge to provide an interactive space for the learner and the virtual agent to collaborate in accomplishing the learning goals. In this paper, we present the design of a semantic ontology that provides the necessary domain-based conceptual knowledge to allow a virtual peer to engage in story...

When a student is feeling negatively while doing some required tasks in a learning environment, in this case, a reading assessment exercise, a conversation with the tutor agent can be initiated to engage the student in an affective text-based dialogue as a means of intervention. Such dialogue can revolve around everyday, commonsense topics that may...

Automatic story generation systems require a collection of common-sense knowledge to generate stories that contain logical and coherent sequences of events appropriate for their intended audience. But manually building and populating a semantic ontology that contains relevant assertions is a tedious task. Crowdsourcing can be used as an approach to...

Automatic story generation systems require a collection of common-sense knowledge to generate stories that contain logical and coherent sequences of events appropriate for their intended audience. But manually building and populating a semantic ontology that contains relevant assertions is a tedious task. Crowdsourcing can be used as an approach to...

Interactive storytelling provides an alternative narrative-based virtual environment where players can simulate actions and experience the consequences of their decisions. The player can navigate around the virtual world and interact with the different objects and non-playing characters in order to fulfill a certain story goal. In this paper, we de...

Semantic ontologies of commonsense concepts have been used to provide the necessary knowledge needed by computer systems to perform various tasks, such as in automatic story generation, interactive scavenger hunt games, virtual museum and storytelling. This paper presents our work in the development of a semantic ontology to support the generation...

Building computer systems that have the ability to generate human understandable stories has been the subject of research in the field of computational narrative, as these can find applications in education and entertainment. But story planning, which involves the identification of a story plot structure and the production of a coherent and interes...

Reading and sharing stories are cognitive tools that we use to gain and exchange information and knowledge. The very nature of stories lends them valuable for use not only in entertaining young minds, but also in educating and helping young children to make sense of the world they live in. The art of telling stories by recalling events in our daily...

A problem with most story generation systems is the lack of an adequately-sized body of knowledge to generate stories from. This paper presents an approach that focuses on providing a large amount of common-sense knowledge to automatic story generators while keeping extensive manual handcrafting of knowledge to a minimum. It does so by combining ma...

Humans interact with each other using their collection of commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts and their relationships. To establish a similar natural form of interaction with computers, they should be given the same collection of knowledge. Various research works have focused on building large-scale commonsense knowledge that computers ca...

Automatic story generation systems must consider both consistency and coherency issues in the stories that they produce. This paper discusses the different agent models adapted to enhance the planning process of Picture Books 2 to produce stories that contain a logical flow of events. Along with the agent models, the ontology structure utilized as...

Storytelling is both an entertaining and an educational tool for children. While Picture Books has shown the capability for a computer system to generate children’s stories, it lacks the storytelling capability needed in order to narrate the story to young beginning readers (age 4-6). Stories that are narrated with emotion can improve the experienc...

Storytelling is both an entertaining and an educational tool for children. While Picture Books has shown the capability for a computer system to generate children's stories, it lacks the storytelling capability needed in order to narrate the story to young beginning readers (age 4-6). Stories that are narrated with emotion can improve the experienc...

Surface realizers are used at the final phase of natural language text generation to convert abstract or symbolic representations of information to linguistic forms in a particular human language. Rules of grammar for the target language are applied to produce text that is syntactically, morphologically and orthographically correct. In this paper,...

Early literacy in children begins through picture draw-ing and the subsequent sharing of an orally narrated story out of the drawn picture. This is the basis for the Picture Books story generation system whose motiva-tion is to produce a textual counterpart of the input pic-ture in order for the child to associate words with im-ages. However, stori...

For children, the act of telling stories develops their language and literacy skills. With this in mind, the Picture Books story generation system was developed to produce children's stories from a single-scene input picture comprising of the elements (i.e, characters and objects) that were provided by a child, to impart that picture stories have t...

An ontology is a conceptual model of what "exists" in a domain, brought into machine-interpretable form by means of expressions in formal logic. Since ontologies are content theories about the kinds, properties and relations of objects, story generators can use them as concept dictionaries for actions and events in a story world. This paper present...

This paper presents our work in developing a commonsense knowledge source based on semantic concepts about objects, activities and their relationships in a child's daily life. This commonsense ontology is then used by our automatic story generator to output children's stories of the fable form from a given input picture. The generated story is a na...

Automatic story generation systems require a body of commonsense knowledge about the basic relationships between concepts we find everyday in our world in order to produce interesting narratives that describe human actions and world events. This paper presents an ongoing work that investigates the use of Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) to re...

The design and content of the planning library of a story generation system dictates the content quality of the story it produces. This paper presents the story planner component of Picture Books, a system that generates stories for children aged 4 to 6 years based on a set of picture elements selected by the user. The planning library separates th...

Text generation systems, such as pun generators, depend on manually created templates which require a lot of effort to build. This paper presents T-Peg, a system that utilizes semantic and phonetic knowledge sources to automatically capture the wordplay patterns of human-made jokes from training examples. The knowledge learned are stored as templat...

Computational models can be built to capture the syntactic structures and semantic patterns of human punning riddles. This model is then used as rules by a computer to generate its own puns. This paper presents T-PEG, a system that utilizes phonetic and semantic linguistic resources to automatically extract word relationships in puns and store the...

A bidirectional English-Filipino machine translation system is developed that extracts translation templates and chunks from a given bilingual English-Filipino corpus. These templates and chunks are then used to translate an input English document to Filipino and vise versa. The system extended the similarity and difference translation template lea...

A text simplification system is developed that accepts as input a document written for college reading level, and converts it to high school reading level text using techniques in natural language processing. The achieved level of lexical and syntactic simplifications is dependent on the lexical and syntactic information stored in the system's know...

In this paper, we present the building of various language resources for a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system. Since linguistics information on Philippine languages are available, but as of yet, the focus has been on theoretical linguistics and little is done on the computational aspects of these languages,...

Picture Books generates stories for children age four to six based on a set of picture elements selected by the user, namely background, characters and objects. The system creates an abstract story representation of the theme for the given picture and uses NLG techniques to generate the sentences in the story. Manual evaluations on 15 generated sto...

In this paper, we present TExt Translation, a bidirectional English-Filipino Example-based Machine Translation System that learns and uses templates. These templates are used for translating English input text into Filipino and vice versa. Minimal language resources and information are used since these resources are few and may contain errors. The...

This paper reports on the error identification component of POPSICLE, a computer-aided language learning software that has been designed to help Filipino language speakers learn standard English. The software assesses the English grammar proficiency of the learner based on an input document, identifies the grammatical errors committed in the docume...

The field of Machine Translation (MT) allows people to communicate more efficiently by providing ways for individuals to translate one body of text from one language into another. There are two common models to this, the Rule-based and the Example-based. The latter, in particular, may be enhanced by combining it with other techniques such as templa...

In this paper, we present the approaches used by our NLP systems to automatically extract templates for example-based machine translation and pun generation. Our translation system is able to extract an average of 73.25% correct translation templates, resulting in a translation quality that has a low word error rate of 18% when the test document co...

This paper presents a template-based machine translation system that extracts templates from a given bilingual corpus, then uses these templates to perform bi-directional English-Filipino translations. The system extended the similarity template learning algorithm of Cicekli and Guvenir [2] by refining existing templates and deriving templates from...

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) refer to computer applications that assist learners through coaching, teaching, testing, guiding exploration, and providing analysis. Though different modalities have been used to present output based on the specific domain and goals of the system, textual output remains to be predominant. Current researches in th...

Difficulty in comprehending written text should not hinder the general population from accessing medical literature. Text simplification is the process of transforming complex sentences into a set of equivalent simpler sentences with the goal of making the resulting text easier to read by some target group. This paper presents SimText, a text simpl...

A bidirectional English-Filipino Example-based Machine Translation System that learns and uses templates is presented. The system uses machine learning techniques to initially extract templates from a given bilingual corpus. These templates are subsequently used for translating English input text into Filipino and vice versa. The system implements...

In this paper, we present what we have attempted towards the digitalization of the Philippine languages and their respective applications, and what we intend to do in the future. We present the development of a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system, and the building of various language resources and tools for...