Writaupair: Assistive Platform for Children with Writing Difficulties

Abstract

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the range of abilities that an individual can perform with assistance but cannot yet perform independently. These skills are called “proximal” because the individual is close to mastering them but needs more guidance and practice in order to perform these actions independently. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of children with learning difficulties. Children with cognitive and other learning difficulties often are unable to organize their thoughts and express their comprehension of a given topic through writing. Such children require comprehensive care and quick intervention, especially during the early childhood years. Based on the concept of the ZPD, we present our work on a contextualized assistive platform called Writaupair, wherein we diagnose the type and extent of learning difficulty faced by a child and accordingly provide contextualized assistance to help him/her with writing long text such as essays. Writaupair employs dependency parsing and state-of-art next sentence prediction model BERT to diagnose the type and extent of learning difficulty a learner has and accordingly prompts keywords, phrases or next sentences to stimulate a topical thinking in children.