Rolf Black

THE CONSTRUCTION OF A PUN GENERATOR FOR LANGUAGE SKILLS DEVELOPMENT

Since the early 1990s, there have been a number of small-scale computer programs that automatically constructed simple verbal jokes (puns), but none of these were fully developed systems that could be used for a practical application. We describe the building and testing of the STANDUP program – a large-scale, robust, interactive, user-friendly pun-generator (inspired by Binsteds JAPE program), which is aimed at allowing children, particularly those with communication disabilities, to develop their linguistic skills. The STANDUP system was designed in consultation with potential users and suitable experts, was rigorously engineered using public-domain linguistic data, and has a special purpose, child-friendly, graphical user interface. The software was tested successfully with real users (children with complex communication needs).

Evaluating the STANDUP Pun Generating Software with Children with Cerebral Palsy

The interactive STANDUP software was developed to provide children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) with a “language playground.” The software provides appropriate functionality for users with physical, speech, and language impairments to generate and tell novel punning riddles at different levels of complexity. STANDUP was evaluated with nine children with cerebral palsy during an eight-week study. Results show that the participants were able to generate and tell novel jokes with minimal or no support. The use of STANDUP impacted favorably on general AAC use. The study results also suggested that STANDUP could potentially have a positive effect on social and pragmatic skills. Further research to investigate the impact of STANDUP on communication skills is proposed. Suggestions for future software development include providing users with opportunities to complete jokes and to integrate online dictionaries when new vocabulary is encountered.

Supporting Personal Narrative for Children with Complex Communication Needs

Children with complex communication needs who use voice output communication aids seldom engage in extended conversation. The “How was School today...?” system has been designed to enable such children to talk about their school day. The system uses data-to-text technology to generate narratives from sensor data. Observations, interviews and prototyping were used to ensure that stakeholders were involved in the design of the system. Evaluations with three children showed that the prototype system, which automatically generates utterances, has the potential to support disabled individuals to participate better in interactive conversation. Analysis of a conversational transcript and observations indicate that the children were able to access relevant conversation and had more control in the conversation in comparison to their usual interactions where control lay mainly with the speaking partner. Further research to develop an improved, more rugged system that supports users with different levels of language ability is now underway.

Adding phonetic similarity data to a lexical database

As part of a project to construct an interactive program which would encourage children to play with language by building jokes, we developed a lexical database, starting from WordNet. To the existing information about part of speech, synonymy, hyponymy, etc., we have added phonetic representations and phonetic similarity ratings for pairs of words/phrases.

Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams.

The Phonicstick: a joystick to generate novel words using phonics

Current Voice Output Communication Aids (VOCAs) give little support for playing with sounds and blending these into words. This paper presents a joystick that can be used to access six different letter sounds (phonics) and blend them into short words. Seven children (five with some degree of physical and/or learning disability) showed their ability to use the device after only one 20 minutes introduction session.

Chronicles: supporting conversational narrative in alternative and augmentative communication

Individuals share experiences and build relationships through the medium of narrative. Lifelong personal narratives play a key role in developing social identity. Individuals with little or no functional speech due to severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) find it difficult to share personal narrative as augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems do not support interactive story telling. As a result, people with congenital SSPI who use AAC may not have learned the linguistic skills involved in sharing narratives. The Chronicles software was developed to support the sharing of personal narrative. Conversational analysis of a conversation using Chronicles illustrates how the system can support more natural conversations when using AAC.