HCJul 30, 2019Code
Decentralising power: how we are trying to keep CALLector ethicalCathy Chua, Hanieh Habibi, Manny Rayner et al.
We present a brief overview of the CALLector project, and consider ethical questions arising from its overall goal of creating a social network to support creation and use of online CALL resources. We argue that these questions are best addressed in a decentralised, pluralistic open source architecture.
HCJul 30, 2019
Alexa as a CALL platform for children: Where do we start?Nikos Tsourakis, Manny Rayner, Hanieh Habibi et al.
Amazon's Alexa is now widely available and shows interesting potential as a platform for hosting CALL games aimed at children. In this paper, we describe an initial informal experiment where we created some simple CALL games and made them available to a few child testers. We report the children's and parents' reactions. Our overall conclusion is that, although Alexa has many positive features, there are still fundamental platform issues in the current version that make it very difficult to build compelling CALL games for children. The games used will soon be freely available for download on the Alexa store.
HCOct 7, 2015
Helping Domain Experts Build Speech Translation SystemsManny Rayner, Alejandro Armando, Pierrette Bouillon et al.
We present a new platform, "Regulus Lite", which supports rapid development and web deployment of several types of phrasal speech translation systems using a minimal formalism. A distinguishing feature is that most development work can be performed directly by domain experts. We motivate the need for platforms of this type and discuss three specific cases: medical speech translation, speech-to-sign-language translation and voice questionnaires. We briefly describe initial experiences in developing practical systems.