Project LISTEN

Project LISTEN (Literacy Innovation that Speech Technology ENables) at Carnegie Mellon University. It has been supported by National Science Foundation under IERI and ITR programs, but currently it is supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Educational Sciences under Grants R305B070458, R305A080157 and R305A080628, and by the Heinz Endowments. The Project is an initiative to create a novel tool to improve literacy. It works like an automated Reading Tutor which displays stories on computer screen and simultaneously listens to children read loud. This project is described as ‘an automated reading Tutor’. The project is headed by David 'Jack' Mostow, Ph.D. It has used the cepstral N-gram stochastic and language-level models of CMU Sphinx to evaluate oral reading and speaking proficiency and provide literacy tutelage.

This project contributes to and provides unique opportunities for educational data mining. It is not a commercial project yet, but has been used by hundreds of children as part of its research and testing.