Leen Sevens

Natural Language Generation from Pictographs

We present a Pictograph-to-Text translation system for people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD). The system translates pictograph messages, consisting of one or more pictographs, into Dutch text using WordNet links and an ngram language model. We also provide several pictograph input methods assisting the users in selecting the appropriate pictographs.

Translating text into pictographs

We describe and evaluate a text-to-pictograph translation system that is used in an online platform for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, which is intended for people who are not able to read and write, but who still want to communicate with the outside world. The system is set up to translate from Dutch into Sclera and Beta, two publicly available pictograph sets consisting of several thousands of pictographs each. We have linked large amounts of these pictographs to synsets or combinations of synsets of Cornetto, a lexical-semantic database for Dutch similar to WordNet. In the translation system, the Dutch input text undergoes shallow linguistic analysis and the synsets of the content words are looked up. The system looks for the nearest pictographs in the lexical-semantic database and displays the message into pictographs. We evaluated the system and results showed a large improvement over the baseline system which consisted of straightforward string-matching between the input text and the filenames of the pictographs. Our system provides a clear improvement in the communication possibilities of illiterate people. Nevertheless there is room for further improvement.

Improving the Precision of Synset Links Between Cornetto and Princeton WordNet

Knowledge-based multilingual language processing benefits from having access to correctly established relations between semantic lexicons, such as the links between different WordNets. WordNet linking is a process that can be sped up by the use of computational techniques. Manual evaluations of the partly automatically established synonym set (synset) relations between Dutch and English in Cornetto, a Dutch lexical-semantic database associated with the EuroWordNet grid, have confronted us with a worrisome amount of erroneous links. By extracting translations from various bilingual resources and automatically assigning a confidence score to every pre-established link, we reduce the error rate of the existing equivalence relations between both languages’ synsets (section 2). We will apply this technique to reuse the connection of Sclera and Beta pictograph sets and Cornetto synsets to Princeton WordNet and other WordNets, allowing us to further extend an existing Dutch text-to-pictograph translation tool to other languages (section 3).

Improving Text-to-Pictograph Translation Through Word Sense Disambiguation

We describe the implementation of a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tool in a Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation system, which converts textual messages into sequences of pictographic images. The system is used in an online platform for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). In the original translation process, the appropriate sense of a word was not disambiguated before converting it into a pictograph. This often resulted in incorrect translations. The implementation of a WSD tool provides a better semantic understanding of the input messages.

Extending a Dutch Text-to-Pictograph Converter to English and Spanish

We describe how a Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation system, designed to augment written text for people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD), was adapted in order to be usable for English and Spanish. The original system has a language-independent design. As far as the textual part is concerned, it is adaptable to all natural languages for which interlingual WordNet [1] links, lemmatizers and part-of-speech taggers are available. As far as the pictographic part is concerned, it can be modified for various pictographic languages. The evaluations show that our results are in line with the performance of the original Dutch system. Text-to-Pictograph translation has a wide application potential in the domain of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The system will be released as an open source product. Index Terms: Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Pictographic Languages, Text-to-Pictograph Translation

Less is more: A rule-based syntactic simplification module for improved text-to-pictograph translation

Abstract In order to enable or facilitate online communication for people with an intellectual disability, the Text-to-Pictograph translation system automatically translates Dutch written text into a series of Sclera or Beta pictographs. The baseline system presents the reader with a more or less verbatim pictograph-per-word translation. As a result, long and complex input sentences lead to long and complex pictograph translations, leaving the end users confused and distracted. To overcome these problems, we developed a rule-based simplification system for Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation. By using recursion and applying the simplification operations in a logical way, only one syntactic parse is needed per message. Promising results are obtained.

Simplified Text-to-Pictograph Translation for People with Intellectual Disabilities

In order to enable or facilitate online communication for people with Intellectual Disabilities, the Text-to-Pictograph translation system automatically translates Dutch written text into a series of Sclera or Beta pictographs. The baseline system presents the reader with a more or less verbatim pictograph-per-word translation. As a result, long and complex input sentences lead to long and complex pictograph translations, leaving the end users confused and distracted. To overcome these problems, we developed a rule-based simplification system for Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation. Our evaluations show a large improvement over the baseline.

Able to Read My Mail: An Accessible e-Mail Client with Assistive Technology

The Able to Include project aims at improving the living conditions of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) in key areas of society. One of its focus points concerns improving the integration of people with IDD in the workplace by introducing accessible Web-based tools. This paper describes one of the tools developed as result of the project: an e-mail client with text simplification and other assistive technologies which makes information transmitted over the Internet more understandable to people with IDD therefore facilitating their labor integration. The accessible Web e-mail client has been developed following a User-Centered Design and tested with people with IDD. The results so far are encouraging.

E-Including the Illiterate

In present-day society, we communicate over the Internet in several media forms. We put videos and images online, listen to music made by famous bands or by our friends, and read and write a lot of text. Never in the history of mankind have we produced more text than at this present moment, so being able to read and write is an important way of taking part in our society. We tend to forget that, even in our educated communities, not all people can read or write and there exist several degrees of literateness. People with reduced cognitive capacities and those migrating from cultures with a different language, or even a completely different writing system, are excluded from fully taking part in written online communication: they are e-excluded.