Ryan Baker


2023

pdf bib
Automatically Generated Summaries of Video Lectures May Enhance Students’ Learning Experience
Hannah Gonzalez | Jiening Li | Helen Jin | Jiaxuan Ren | Hongyu Zhang | Ayotomiwa Akinyele | Adrian Wang | Eleni Miltsakaki | Ryan Baker | Chris Callison-Burch
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)

We introduce a novel technique for automatically summarizing lecture videos using large language models such as GPT-3 and we present a user study investigating the effects on the studying experience when automatic summaries are added to lecture videos. We test students under different conditions and find that the students who are shown a summary next to a lecture video perform better on quizzes designed to test the course materials than the students who have access only to the video or the summary. Our findings suggest that adding automatic summaries to lecture videos enhances the learning experience. Qualitatively, students preferred summaries when studying under time constraints.

2019

pdf bib
Curio SmartChat : A system for Natural Language Question Answering for Self-Paced K-12 Learning
Srikrishna Raamadhurai | Ryan Baker | Vikraman Poduval
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

During learning, students often have questions which they would benefit from responses to in real time. In class, a student can ask a question to a teacher. During homework, or even in class if the student is shy, it can be more difficult to receive a rapid response. In this work, we introduce Curio SmartChat, an automated question answering system for middle school Science topics. Our system has now been used by around 20,000 students who have so far asked over 100,000 questions. We present data on the challenge created by students’ grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, and discuss our system’s approach and degree of effectiveness at disambiguating questions that the system is initially unsure about. We also discuss the prevalence of student “small talk” not related to science topics, the pluses and minuses of this behavior, and how a system should respond to these conversational acts. We conclude with discussions and point to directions for potential future work.