The Application of Natural Language Processing to Augmentative and Alternative Communication (original) (raw)

Augmentative and Alternative Communication Emerging Trends, Opportunities and Innovations

Springer eBooks, 2022

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) technologies, training and support have benefitted from significant emerging trends in recent years to cope with the changing environments experienced by many users. The landscape of inclusion, whether it means different forms of digital accessibility, telesupport or more built-in assistive technology in everyday devices, has helped many more individuals with speech and language difficulties communicate effectively. There has also been an increased use of artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing with improved multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text to speech, location capturing apps and the Internet of Things being just a few of the technologies providing the world of AAC with a wealth of exciting emerging trends, opportunities and innovations. This special thematic session aims to provide an insight into some of the trends developing across Europe and the wider community.

Design and evaluation of ECO: an augmentative and alternative communication tool

Universal Access in the Information Society, 2021

Current technology provides new challenges to improve skills on people with special necessities. In fact, persons with communications needs can take advantage of new devices and mobile applications to interact and communicate easily and in the most straightforward way. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems are oriented to users who cannot use natural language due to temporary or permanent impairments, providing an alternative to natural language for communication. In this paper, we present design guidelines for ECO (Easy Communication Application), an AAC tool designed with a User-Centered Design (UCD) approach to make functional communication easier for individuals with complex communication needs. ECO tool has two well-defined modules: the Communication User and the Communication Manager. The former is thought as an AAC tool, whilst the Communication Manager module provides a way to edit the content and fit the dynamics of use and application design to the user's interests. In addition, we present an evaluation of the ECO tool from two different perspectives. On the one hand, we have achieved a heuristic-based expert evaluation in order to analyse the functionality corresponding to the Communication Manager module of the tool, in order to check main accessibility requirements and improve functionality accordingly. On the other hand, we have evaluated both the Communication Manager and Communication User modules in a real context, carrying out a qualitative evaluation with final users and their therapists to check whether the tool is useful in concrete daily scenarios. Results corroborate research questions, demonstrating that ECO meets the most important accessibility requirements and it is highly valued by experts and end-users.

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING SERVICES IN ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY

IAEME, 2019

This project consists on creating an app that helps people with partial or total loss of hearing and deaf people. It is ideally designed to be used in academic environments and classrooms where students with these conditions can carry out their everyday activities with normalcy. Hence, the application enables teacher and student to join a chat room so that the teacher can give a class while the student sees his words reflected in the text of the chat room in the chosen language. The application has an additional function that consists on turning text into speech to communicate easily with others (not only in the academic environment). Users are allowed to record audio with the microphone to convert text so it can be read by a deaf person especially during short conversations. This is planned through cognition services offered by Google AI with cloud data processing algorithms where developers have access to high-level services that boost the creation of solutions that require Artificial Intelligence (AI). The eagerness of this project is reflected in the fact that 100% of the people interviewed to assess the app agree that it can be useful tool for society. Therefore, they conclude that there is an 80% probability that they will download the app in a nearby future.

Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology

1995

Spoken language interfaces to computers is a topic that has lured and fascinated engineers and speech scientists alike for over ve decades. For many, the ability to converse freely with a machine represents the ultimate challenge to our understanding of the production and perception processes involved in human speech communication. In addition to being a provocative topic, spoken language interfaces are fast becoming a necessity.

Natural Language Processing: A Human-Computer Interaction Perspective

Advances in Computers, 1998

Natural language processing has been in existence for more than fifty years. During this time, it has significantly contributed to the field of human-computer interaction in terms of theoretical results and practical applications. As computers continue to become more affordable and accessible, the importance of user interfaces that are effective, robust, unobtrusive, and user-friendly -regardless of user expertise or impediments -becomes more pronounced. Since natural language usually provides for effortless and effective communication in human-human interaction, its significance and potential in human-computer interaction should not be overlooked -either spoken or typewritten, it may effectively complement other available modalities, 1 such as windows, icons, and menus, and pointing; in some cases, such as in users with disabilities, natural language may even be the only applicable modality. This chapter examines the field of natural language processing as it relates to humancomputer interaction by focusing on its history, interactive application areas, theoretical approaches to linguistic modeling, and relevant computational and philosophical issues. It also presents a taxonomy for interactive natural language systems based on their linguistic knowledge and processing requirements, and reviews related applications. Finally, it discusses linguistic coverage issues, and explores the development of natural language widgets and their integration into multimodal user interfaces.

Towards a road map on human language technology

COLING-02 on A roadmap for computational linguistics -, 2002

This document summarizes contributions and discussions from two workshops that took place in November 2000 and July 2001. It presents some visions of NLP-related applications that may become reality within ten years from now. It investigates the technological requirements that must be met in order to make these visions realistic and sketches milestones that may help to measure our progress towards these goals.

Toward a communication device which generates sentences

1989

Abstract: Sentence generation will be an integral part of future augmentative communication devices. By employing natural language processing techniques, we hope to enhance the speed, flexibility, and ease of use of current word-based systems. In this paper, we discuss ...