Literacy, or the ability to read and write, is a crucial indicator of success in life and greater society. It is estimated that 85% of people in juvenile delinquent systems cannot adequately read or write, that more than half of those with substance abuse issues have complications in reading or writing and that two-thirds of those who do not complete high school lack proper literacy skills. Furthermore, young children who do not possess reading skills matching grade level by the fourth grade are approximately 80% likely to not catch up at all. Many may believe that in a developed country such as the United States, literacy fails to be an issue; however, this is a dangerous misunderstanding. Globally an estimated 1.19 trillion dollars are lost every year due to issues in literacy; in the USA, the loss is an estimated 300 billion. To put it in more shocking terms, one in five American adults still fail to comprehend basic sentences. Making matters worse, the only tools available now to correct a lack of reading and writing ability are found in expensive tutoring or other programs that oftentimes fail to be able to reach the required audience. In this paper, our team puts forward a new way of teaching English spelling and word recognitions to grade school students in the United States: Wordification. Wordification is a web application designed to teach English literacy using principles of linguistics applied to the orthographic and phonological properties of words in a manner not fully utilized previously in any computer-based teaching application.

As people become more aware of their food choices, food computation models have become increasingly popular in assisting people in maintaining healthy eating habits. For example, food recommendation systems analyze recipe instructions to assess nutritional contents and provide recipe recommendations. The recent and remarkable successes of generative AI methods, such as auto-regressive large language models, can lead to robust methods for a more comprehensive understanding of recipes for healthy food recommendations beyond surface-level nutrition content assessments. In this study, we explore the use of generative AI methods to extend current food computation models, primarily involving the analysis of nutrition and ingredients, to also incorporate cooking actions (e.g., add salt, fry the meat, boil the vegetables, etc.). Cooking actions are notoriously hard to model using statistical learning methods due to irregular data patterns - significantly varying natural language descriptions for the same action (e.g., marinate the meat vs. marinate the meat and leave overnight) and infrequently occurring patterns (e.g., add salt occurs far more frequently than marinating the meat). The prototypical approach to handling irregular data patterns is to increase the volume of data that the model ingests by orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, in the cooking domain, these problems are further compounded with larger data volumes presenting a unique challenge that is not easily handled by simply scaling up. In this work, we propose novel aggregation-based generative AI methods, Cook-Gen, that reliably generate cooking actions from recipes, despite difficulties with irregular data patterns, while also outperforming Large Language Models and other strong baselines.

A South Carolina college philosophy professor is warning that we should expect a flood cheating with ChatGPT - a chatbot from OpenAI that's powered by artificial intelligence - after catching one of his students using it to generate an essay. Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, wrote a lengthy Facebook post this month detailing issues with the advanced chatbot and the'first plagiarist' he'd caught for a recent assignment to write 500 words on Hume and the paradox of horror. ChatGPT, which has been trained on a gigantic sample of text from the internet, can understand human language, conduct conversations with humans and generate detailed text that many have said is human-like and quite impressive. 'ChatGPT responds in seconds with a response that looks like it was written by a human--moreover, a human with a good sense of grammar and an understanding of how essays should be structured,' Hicks wrote. Darren Hick, a philosophy professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, wrote a lengthy Facebook post this month detailing issues with the advanced chatbot and the'first plagiarist' he'd caught for a recent assignment'The first indicator that I was dealing with A.I. is that, despite the syntactic coherence of the essay, it made no sense.'