Sifu: Interactive Crowd-Assisted Language Learning

This paper introduces SIFU, a system that recruits in real time native speakers as online volunteer tutors to help answer questions from Chinese language learners in reading news articles. SIFU integrates the strengths of two effective online language learning methods: reading online news and communicating with online native speakers. SIFU recruits volunteers from an online social network rather than recruits workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk.Initial experiments showed that the proposed approach is able to effectively recruit online volunteer tutors, adequately answer the learners' questions, and efficiently obtain an answer for the learner. Our field deployment illustrates that SIFU is very useful in assisting Chinese learners in reading Chinese news articles and online volunteer tutors are willing to help Chinese learners when they are on social network service.