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Purpose:Complex scientific problems, including those facing the discipline of communication sciences and disorders (CSD), require interdisciplinary teams of scientists who bring diverse perspectives, knowledge, and skills. According to a recent survey, team science is not yet widely practiced by CSD researchers. This viewpoint describes a current interdisciplinary team science project that addresses a challenging problem for CSD practitioners: meeting the needs of young children with speech and language disabilities for screening and intervention using artificial intelligence–augmented technologies. Method:The article draws from the research literature on the science of team science to describe common challenges faced by interdisciplinary teams and recommended practices to resolve the challenges. Throughout, we provide examples from the National Artificial Intelligence Institute for Exceptional Education to illustrate team science challenges and how they can be addressed. Conclusions:Readers are encouraged to embrace interdisciplinary teamwork to advance the science of CSD. We recommend seeking out training in team science, advocating for professional development opportunities, and institutional support for team science to maximize its benefits for the field. 

Abstract Dyslexia and dysgraphia are two specific learning disabilities (SLDs) that are prevalent among children. To minimize the negative impact these SLDs have on a child’s academic and social-emotional development, it is crucial to identify dyslexia and dysgraphia at an early age, enabling timely and effective intervention. The first step in this process is screening, which helps determine if a child requires further instruction or a more in-depth assessment. Current screening tools are expensive, require additional administration time beyond regular classroom activities, and are designed to screen exclusively for one condition, not for both dyslexia and dysgraphia, which often share some common behavioral characteristics. Most dyslexia screeners focus on speech and oral tasks and exclude writing activities. However, analyzing children’s writing samples for behavioral signs of dyslexia and dysgraphia can offer valuable insights into the screening process, which can be time-consuming. As a solution, we propose a co-designed framework for building artificial intelligence (AI) tools that could boost the efficiency of screening and aid practitioners such as speech-language pathologists (SLPs), occupational therapists, general educators, and special educators by simplifying their tasks. This paper reviews current screening methods employed by practitioners, the use of AI-based systems in identifying dyslexia and dysgraphia, and the handwriting datasets available to train such systems. The paper also outlines a framework for developing an AI-integrated screening tool that can identify writing-based behavioral indicators of dyslexia and dysgraphia in children’s handwriting. This framework can be used in conjunction with current screening tools like the Dysgraphia and Dyslexia Behavioral Indicator Checklist (DDBIC). The paper also proposes a methodology for collecting children’s offline and online handwriting samples to build a valuable dataset for developing AI solutions. The proposed framework and data collection methodology are co-designed with SLPs, occupational therapists (OTs), special educators, and general educators to ensure the tool can provide explainable, actionable information that would be invaluable in a practical setting. 

Identifying effective interventions from the scientific literature is challenging due to the high volume of publications, specialized terminology, and inconsistent reporting formats, making manual curation laborious and prone to oversight. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel framework leveraging large language models (LLMs), which integrates a progressive ontology prompting (POP) algorithm with a dual-agent system, named LLM-Duo. On the one hand, the POP algorithm conducts a prioritized breadth-first search (BFS) across a predefined ontology, generating structured prompt templates and action sequences to guide the automatic annotation process. On the other hand, the LLM-Duo system features two specialized LLM agents, an explorer and an evaluator, working collaboratively and adversarially to continuously refine annotation quality. We showcase the real-world applicability of our framework through a case study focused on speech-language intervention discovery. Experimental results show that our approach surpasses advanced baselines, achieving more accurate and comprehensive annotations through a fully automated process. Our approach successfully identified 2,421 interventions from a corpus of 64,177 research articles in the speech-language pathology domain, culminating in the creation of a publicly accessible intervention knowledge base with great potential to benefit the speech-language pathology community.