Re:Member: Emotional Question Generation from Personal Memories

Zackary Rackauckas, Nobuaki Minematsu, Julia Hirschberg


Abstract
We present Re:Member, a system that explores how emotionally expressive, memory-grounded interaction can support more engaging second language (L2) learning. By drawing on users’ personal videos and generating stylized spoken questions in the target language, Re:Member is designed to encourage affective recall and conversational engagement. The system aligns emotional tone with visual context, using expressive speech styles such as whispers or late-night tones to evoke specific moods. It combines WhisperX-based transcript alignment, 3-frame visual sampling, and Style-BERT-VITS2 for emotional synthesis within a modular generation pipeline. Designed as a stylized interaction probe, Re:Member highlights the role of affect and personal media in learner-centered educational technologies.
Anthology ID:
2025.hcinlp-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Su Lin Blodgett, Amanda Cercas Curry, Sunipa Dev, Siyan Li, Michael Madaio, Jack Wang, Sherry Tongshuang Wu, Ziang Xiao, Diyi Yang
Venues:
HCINLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
163–168
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.hcinlp-1.13/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zackary Rackauckas, Nobuaki Minematsu, and Julia Hirschberg. 2025. Re:Member: Emotional Question Generation from Personal Memories. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP), pages 163–168, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Re:Member: Emotional Question Generation from Personal Memories (Rackauckas et al., HCINLP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.hcinlp-1.13.pdf