AI in Practice – helping language students make sense of the real world

In this project, AI is helping to transform students’ language learning experience at an International College. The aim is to generate enthusiasm and aptitude for language learning, even if the language is as unfamiliar as Mandarin is to many learners.

To help students to practice the language they learn in real-world contexts, an International College is building a library of video and audio clips, images of writing and other objects.

In the classroom, accents are consistent and characters are neatly printed. In the real world, words may be mumbled in different accents and handwriting can be untidy. A media library will expose students to a greater diversity of examples of spoken and written words as they actually occur so that they become more adept in using the knowledge they have acquired.

The challenge is to label each item that is uploaded to the library, including transcribing any dialogue in audio/video files, identifying any written characters in images as well as tagging all media with descriptors. At the moment this labelling is being done manually; in the future, the majority of this work will be done by AI. The first task is to construct the library database in a way that enables the machine to learn from what the work the editors are doing.

So how does AI help with this? In this project, AI is enabling the college to create a media library as a resource for teachers and learners of Chinese. To begin with, the library is being populated by people within the organisation. The aim is to open it up so anyone can contribute. At that point, there will be too much content for it to be filtered by humans. Machine learning allows an Artificial Intelligence to be developed that labels media in the same way that the library curators do but at a pace and scale that is humanly impossible.

As the machine learns, it is increasingly able to relieve the editorial team of transcribing, captioning, tagging and age-certification work. This allows the project to include media from an ever broader variety of sources so that the library grows larger, richer and faster than would be possible without AI.

The College’s Product Development Director commented:

"CKX has enabled us to leverage cutting-edge technology to grow a library of real world media for our students that is much larger, richer and more current than what we have been able to compile manually. As a result, our students’ language learning is more relevant and engaging”.