Assistive Technology: Using Natural Language Generation Technology for Assisting Language Impaired Children
- Project number: 202-08-10
- Students: Yael Netzer
- Supervisor: Michael Elhadad
Natural language generation (NLG) refers to the process of producing text in a spoken language, starting from an internal knowledge representation structure. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) deals with the development of devices and tools to enable basic conversation for language-impaired people. We present an applied prototype of an AAC-NLG system generating written output in English and Hebrew from a sequence of Bliss symbols. The system does not "translate" the symbols sequence, but instead, it dynamically changes the communication board as the choice of symbols proceeds according to the syntactic and semantic content of selected symbols, generating utterances in natural language through a process of semantic authoring.
We have also designed and implemented a lexicon of Bliss-Hebrew-English words that takes into account this information: the lexicon can be searched by keyword doctor, or by semantic/graphic component: searching all words in the lexicon that contain both person and medical returns the symbols aiding tool, artificial insemination, dentist, doctor, nurse etc. The design of the lexicon enables easy manipulation of the symbols (graphical editing, adding new synonyms) and an easy way to insert new symbols (by combining existing symbols or by drawing a new one). It contains both Hebrew and English words and adjusts the representation according to the language.
