Our Research

Relay Reader is an application designed to support users in transitioning from word-by-word reading to reading fluency. A user takes turns listening to and reading aloud high-interest, extended-length books, acquiring the valuable skill of being able to read longer texts without frustration while also enjoying a positive, interactive experience with a great story. Reading in this manner across multiple sessions gives the user the opportunity to access longer books while building motivation and stamina for extended reading over time.

Relay Reader is backed by an evidence-based program of research as illustrated by the following list of peer-reviewed publications.

(Note: Relay Reader was internally named My Turn To Read for a period of time, which is why the latter appears in some of the papers below.)

A Dynamic Model of Lexical Experience for Tracking of Oral Reading Fluency. Beata Beigman Klebanov, Michael Suhan, Zuowei Wang and Tenaha O'Reilly. 2023. Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications (BEA).
Beyond Text Complexity: Production-related Sources of Text-based Variability in Oral Reading Fluency. Van Rynald T. Liceralde, Anastassia Loukina, Beata Beigman Klebanov, and John R. Lockwood. 2022. Journal of Educational Psychology 114(1):16-36. [author draft]
A Good Start is Half the Battle Won: Unsupervised Pre-training for Low Resource Children's Speech Recognition for an Interactive Reading Companion. Abhinav Misra, Anastassia Loukina, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Binod Gyawali, and Klaus Zechner. 2021. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED).
Exploring Structured Error to Improve Automated Scoring of Oral Reading Fluency. Beata Beigman Klebanov and Anastassia Loukina. 2021. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED).
Detecting Learning in Noisy Data: The Case of Oral Reading Fluency. Beata Beigman Klebanov, Anastassia Loukina, John Lockwood, Van Liceralde, John Sabatini, Nitin Madnani, Binod Gyawali, Zuowei Wang and Jennifer Lentini. 2020. Proceedings of the 10th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK).
Automated Estimation of Oral Reading Fluency during Summer Camp E-book Reading with MyTurnToRead. Anastassia Loukina, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Patrick Lange, Yao Qian, Binod Gyawali, Nitin Madnani, Abhinav Misra, Klaus Zechner, Zuowei Wang, and John Sabatini. 2019. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH).
My Turn To Read: An Interleaved E-book Reading Tool for Developing and Struggling Readers. Nitin Madnani, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Anastassia Loukina, Binod Gyawali, Patrick Lange, John Sabatini and Michael Flor. 2019. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics – System Demonstrations (ACL).
Would you? Could you? On a Tablet? Analytics of Children's E-book Reading. Beata Beigman Klebanov, Anastassia Loukina, Nitin Madnani, John Sabatini, and Jennifer Lentini. 2019. Proceedings of the 9th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK).
Evaluating On-device ASR on Field Recordings from an Interactive Reading Companion. Anastassia Loukina, Nitin Madnani, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Abhinav Misra, Georgi Angelov and Ognjen Todic. 2018. Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology (SLT).
Towards Understanding Text Factors in Oral Reading. Anastassia Loukina, Van Liceralde, and Beata Beigman Klebanov. 2018. Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT).
Developing Speech Processing Technologies for Shared Book Reading with a Computer. Anastassia Loukina, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Patrick Lange, Binod Gyawali, and Yao Qian. 2017. Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Child Computer Interaction (WOCCI).
Continuous Fluency Tracking and the Challenges of Varying Text Complexity. Beata Beigman Klebanov, Anastassia Loukina, John Sabatini, and Tenaha O'Reilly. 2017. Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative use of Natural Language Processing for Building Educational Applications (BEA).