Personal storytelling: Using Natural Language Generation for children with complex communication needs, in the wild… (original) (raw)

Using NLG and sensors to support personal narrative for children with complex communication needs

2010

We are building a tool that helps children with Complex Communication Needs 1 (CCN) to create stories about their day at school. The tool uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to create a draft story based on sensor data of the child's activities, which the child can edit. This work is still in its early stages, but we believe it has great potential to support interactive personal narrative which is not well supported by current Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) tools. 1 The term Complex Communication Needs (CCN) describes individuals who, due to motor, language, cognitive, and/or sensory perceptual impairments (e.g., as a result of cerebral palsy), do not develop speech and language skills as expected. This heterogeneous group typically experiences restricted access to the environment, limited interactions with their communication partners, and few opportunities for communication (Light and Drager 2007).

A new tool to support interactive narrative experience for children with communication disorders

2010

An interactive narrative tool for children with communication disorders has been developed that aims to provide children with the experience of interactive narrative based conversation. The tool, which runs on a tablet PC, automatically generates an interactive narrative based on information collected by the tool using environmental sensors and other data. Staff can also record voice messages which are automatically integrated into the narrative text. The child can personalise the generated story by adding comments or deleting unwanted events before using it for interactive communication. A user-centred design involving children, staff and parents led to the development of the prototype, which was evaluated with two children in a special school. The results of the initial evaluation showed that both children could use the system for interactive conversation and that it provided parents with a focus when discussing the school day. A follow-on project is now underway to address issues about everyday use in a school environment and its use with a wider spectrum of intellectual/learning disabilities.

A Text to Image Story Teller Specially Challenged Children - Natural Language Processing Approach

2015

Every human relishes happiness when he or she becomes a creator. This happiness does not have any metrics. A person who plants a tree, to a person who works on the most complicated flight engines feels happy on his creation. The work attempted in this paper is to make children the creators. Children have wonderful capabilities to create and innovate new things. Specially challenged children are equally talented in their own way. Challenged children identified with capability outperform everybody in their competitive line. This research work is an application which can be used by such children which kindles their creativity and helps them showcase their abilities. These children can create their own pictorial story board in a fashion as it comes to their mind. The text story is handled as a natural language input and translated to a scrolling layer of images, which are picked by the user.

IRJET- Storytelling App for Children with Hearing Impairment Using Natural Language Processing (NLP

IRJET, 2020

During childhood, children's teachers, parents or grandparents read them a lot of fantastic stories. They did that for the time we couldn't read. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with an ability to hear. The children with hearing impairments might not have had a chance to know such stories at least in their childhood. This project is based on an app which narrates children's stories to hearing impaired children by taking in stories in form of text as input and giving images of sign language gestures and speech as output. In this paper, a platform Kahani which translates written English into Indian Sign Language is presented.

Storytelling App for Children with Hearing Impairment Using Natural Language Processing (NLP

During childhood, children's teachers, parents or grandparents read them a lot of fantastic stories. They did that for the time we couldn't read. Unfortunately, not everyone is blessed with an ability to hear. The children with hearing impairments might not have had a chance to know such stories at least in their childhood. This project is based on an app which narrates children's stories to hearing impaired children by taking in stories in form of text as input and giving images of sign language gestures and speech as output. In this paper, a platform Kahani which translates written English into Indian Sign Language is presented.

Storytelling Utilizing Generative AI to Foster Inclusion of Individuals with Disabilities

This article presents the comprehensive design and evaluation of a digital storytelling system tailored for Latin American children aged 4 to 6, leveraging generative artificial intelligence. Tests were conducted to assess the system’s functionality, content diversity, generation times, and voice quality, including intonation, speed, and pronunciation. The results substantiate the system’s operational efficacy and user-friendly interface. The stories generated demonstrate substantial diversity, as indicated by Jaccard indices calculations, which reveal a maximum value of 0.2 derived from evaluating 30 distinct stories. As expected, there was a proportional increase in story generation times relative to their length. ’Onyx’ from OpenAI’s text-to-speech (TTS) was identified as the most appropriate voice for storytelling. Nonetheless, pronunciation inaccuracies were observed across all tested TTS model voices. The analysis demonstrated that the system generates a variety of stories that foster value formation in Spanish-speaking children, thereby promoting the importance of including individuals with disabilities. Notably, all content within the stories was found to be suitable for children, with no inappropriate material detected in any of the narratives.

A flexible approach to natural language generation for disabled children

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop on - COLING ACL '06, 2006

Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a way to automatically realize a correct expression in response to a communicative goal. This technology is mainly explored in the fields of machine translation, report generation, dialog system etc. In this paper we have explored the NLG technique for another novel applicationassisting disabled children to take part in conversation. The limited physical ability and mental maturity of our intended users made the NLG approach different from others. We have taken a flexible approach where main emphasis is given on flexibility and usability of the system. The evaluation results show this technique can increase the communication rate of users during a conversation.

Using NLG to Help Language-Impaired Users Tell Stories and Participate in Social Dialogues

2009

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems are communication aids for people who cannot speak because of motor or cognitive impairments. We are developing AAC systems where users select information they wish to communicate, and this is expressed using an NLG system. We believe this model will work well in contexts where AAC users wish to go beyond simply making requests or answering questions, and have more complex communicative goals such as story-telling and social interaction.

NLP Story Maker

This paper explores a novel approach to linking Graphics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our tool, Story Maker, lets users illustrate their stories on the fly, as they enter them on the computer in natural language. Our goals in creating Story Maker are twofold: to explore the use of NLP in the dynamic generation of animated scenes, and to explore ways to exploit users' input in order to obviate the necessity of having a large database of graphics. With our NLP technology, users can input unrestricted natural language. Story Maker provides users with direct visual output in response to their natural language input. The tool can potentially impact both the way we interact with computers and the way we compose text.