Fact-in-a-Box: Hiding Educational Facts in Short Stories for Implicit Learning

Alia El Bolock, Caroline Sabty, Nour Awad, Slim Abdennadher, Slim Abdennadher

2023

Abstract

Generating stories on-demand is one of the covered tasks in Natural Language Generation. Stories are being used in every culture by any age. They have been used for different purposes, such as entertainment and the education of children. They are an effective way of indirectly providing students with valuable facts that are easier embedded in their memory. We propose an approach for embedding facts into existing or automatically generated stories, given a specific target audience and a story context. As proof of concept, we implemented a framework called Fact-in-a-Box to hide facts in existing stories or a human-like generated text through a customized user. The framework is based on a fine-tuned model for children as the target audience and fixes the story context to animals. Instructors can apply the approach to deliver facts to the learner in an exciting yet informative way. The framework is composed of two modules, one for selecting the most relevant story and the other one to embed the fact in it. We tested the proposed approach using an experiment to test the learning gain of children and a survey for adults to evaluate the language of the resulting stories and the concept itself. The performance was relatively good in hiding facts inside an existing story where children could correctly re-convey 50% of the complex facts and 80% of the simpler tasks.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

El Bolock A., Sabty C., Awad N. and Abdennadher S. (2023). Fact-in-a-Box: Hiding Educational Facts in Short Stories for Implicit Learning. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-641-5, SciTePress, pages 330-336. DOI: 10.5220/0011985100003470

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu23,
author={Alia El Bolock and Caroline Sabty and Nour Awad and Slim Abdennadher},
title={Fact-in-a-Box: Hiding Educational Facts in Short Stories for Implicit Learning},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2023},
pages={330-336},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011985100003470},
isbn={978-989-758-641-5},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Fact-in-a-Box: Hiding Educational Facts in Short Stories for Implicit Learning
SN - 978-989-758-641-5
AU - El Bolock A.
AU - Sabty C.
AU - Awad N.
AU - Abdennadher S.
PY - 2023
SP - 330
EP - 336
DO - 10.5220/0011985100003470
PB - SciTePress