  Much of early literacy education happens at home with caretakers reading
books to young children. Prior research demonstrates how having dialogue with
children during co-reading can develop critical reading readiness skills, but
most adult readers are unsure if and how to lead effective conversations. We
present ContextQ, a tablet-based reading application to unobtrusively present
auto-generated dialogic questions to caretakers to support this dialogic
reading practice. An ablation study demonstrates how our method of encoding
educator expertise into the question generation pipeline can produce
high-quality output; and through a user study with 12 parent-child dyads (child
age: 4-6), we demonstrate that this system can serve as a guide for parents in
leading contextually meaningful dialogue, leading to significantly more
conversational turns from both the parent and the child and deeper
conversations with connections to the child's everyday life.
