Tonio Wandmacher

Sibylle, An Assistive Communication System Adapting to the Context and Its User

In this article, we describe the latest version of Sibylle, an AAC system that permits persons who have severe physical disabilities to enter text with any computer application, as well as to compose messages to be read out through speech synthesis. The system consists of a virtual keyboard comprising a set of keypads that allow for the entering of characters or full words by a single-switch selection process. It also includes a sophisticated word prediction component which dynamically calculates the most appropriate words for a given context. This component is auto-adaptive, that is, it learns with every text the user enters. It thus adapts its predictions to the users language and the current topic of communication as well. So far, the system works for French, German and English. Earlier versions of Sibylle have been used since 2001 in a rehabilitation center (Kerpape, France).

SIBYLLE: a system for alternative communication adapting to the context and its user

In this paper, we describe the latest version of SIBYLLE, an AAC system that permits persons suffering from severe physical disabilities to enter text with any computer application and also to compose messages to be read out by a speech synthesis module. The system consists of a virtual keyboard comprising a set of keypads which allow entering characters or full words by a single-switch selection process. It also comprises a sophisticated word prediction component which dynamically calculates the most appropriate words for a given context. This component is auto-adaptive, i.e. it learns on every text the user has entered. It thus adapts its predictions to the users language and the current topic of communication as well. So far the system works for French, German and English. Earlier versions of SIBYLLE have been used since 2001 in the Kerpape rehabilitation center (Brittany, France).

Adaptation of Ontological Knowledge from Structured Textual Data

This paper provides a general framework for the extraction and adaptation of ontological knowledge from new structured information. The cycle of this process is described starting with the extraction of semantic knowledge from syntactically given information, the transformation of this information into an appropriate format of description logic, and the dynamic update of a given ontology with this new information where certain types of potentially occurring inconsistencies are automatically resolved. The framework uses crucially certain tools for this incremental update. In addition to WordNet, the usage of FrameNet plays an important role, in order to provide a consistent basis for reasoning applications. The cycle of rewriting textual definitions into description logic axioms is prototypically implemented as well as the resolution of certain types of inconsistencies in the dynamic update of ontologies.