AI Japanese Literature SENSEI
Project overview
AI-Sensei is an experimental AI-supported learning platform designed to help students become more attentive, independent, and confident readers of literature. Instead of supplying ready-made interpretations, summaries, or assignment answers, the program guides students through literary texts by asking carefully sequenced questions. These questions encourage them to notice particular words, images, patterns, shifts in tone, narrative perspective, ambiguity, and contradiction, and then to develop interpretations grounded in textual evidence.
The project begins from a simple pedagogical principle: AI should support the process of reading rather than replace it. Students will be able to paste or select passages in Japanese, English, and other languages, annotate them, ask questions, and enter into a structured conversation with an AI reading companion. The system will offer different modes of engagement, including introductory close reading, broader comprehension, comparative reading, and theoretically informed approaches such as narratology, feminism, Marxism, ecocriticism, and reader-response criticism.
AI-Sensei is currently being developed as a beta-stage web application in collaboration with the HKU Arts Technology Lab and students with backgrounds in computing and engineering. Its development brings together literary scholarship, pedagogy, interface design, and AI engineering. Future features may include a literature conversation partner, guided comparative reading, multilingual literary databases, and carefully designed “writer bots” that introduce students to the language, historical context, and intellectual concerns associated with particular Japanese authors. The project’s broader aim is to demonstrate how AI can be used to deepen reading, interpretation, and critical reflection rather than automate them.
Research Outcome
The central outcome of the project will be a functional and pedagogically tested version of AI-Sensei that can be used in university literature and cultural studies courses. The platform will combine a multilingual reading interface, guided Socratic dialogue, text annotation, interpretive “lenses,” and a curated collection of public-domain, open-access, licensed, or instructor-provided literary materials.
Although the first version will focus on Japanese literature and multilingual university teaching, the underlying model is intended to be adaptable. It could later support other literary traditions, different levels of education, and the interpretation of cultural forms such as film, manga, visual art, museum objects, and digital media. The longer-term ambition is to create a flexible environment for guided literary, cultural, and artistic inquiry that can be used by students, teachers, schools, libraries, and cultural institutions.
About the researcher
Edwin Michielsen is Assistant Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research examines modern and contemporary Japanese literature in relation to political movements, social change, and transnational cultural exchange. His earlier work has focused particularly on proletarian literature and international solidarity in imperial Japan.
His current research investigates representations of work, technology, precarity, automation, and everyday life in contemporary Japanese literature and culture. Alongside this work, he is developing new approaches to humanities education that respond critically and creatively to the growth of generative AI. AI-Sensei emerges from this intersection of literary scholarship and pedagogy, seeking to use AI not to bypass reading, but to improve and deepen literacy through sustained close reading, critical questioning, and evidence-based interpretation.
Fund Source
Seed Fund for Staff (Approved)
For inquiries, please contact atlab@hku.hk.