Some background on AAC and NLP

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is concerned with technology to help people who have difficulty with communication. It is necessarily a broad area, because of the diverse needs it aims to address. People may have communication difficulties for purely physical reasons, or because they have some cognitive or linguistic impairment. Some simple AAC devices store a fixed number of prerecorded messages but others synthesize speech from arbitrary text (or alternative symbols) input by the user. Letter and word prediction to support text input to AAC devices was among the first practical applications of natural language processing (NLP) techniques. In spite of this, work on AAC by NLP researchers has been somewhat limited (although see Alm et al (1992) and Demasco and McCoy (1992)). However, over the last few years there has been an informally coordinated series of workshops in NLP and AAC: NLP&AAC'96 was held at the University of Dundee, a workshop on NLP for communication aids (http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~aac/clworkshop.html) was held in conjunction with ACL/EACL'97 in Madrid (Copestake et al, 1997), and a research symposium on NLP was held at ISAAC 98 (the main AAC conference) in Dublin. The papers from this are collected in Loncke et al (1999). A special issue of Natural Language Engineering (edited by Stefan Langer) appeared at the beginning of 1998. AAC research related to NLP is also sometimes presented at ASSETS and at AAAI meetings.

Work on AAC also has close connections with work on HCI for people with disabilities. AAC devices are often special-purpose computers, or, in some cases, a general-purpose laptop used with special-purpose software. Furthermore, the increasing availability of computer technology and, in particular, of Internet access, has a considerable potential to empower people with disabilities. For example, email can be used by people who are deaf or who do not have intelligible speech. Ideally, technology for AAC should be integrated with computer applications, so that, for example, the same techniques which enable the user to input text to a speech synthesizer also allow them to write email, send messages to bulletin boards and so on.

REFERENCES

Norman Alm, John L. Arnott and Alan F. Newell. Prediction and conversational momentum in an augmentative communication system Communications of the ACM, 35(5), 47--57, 1992

Ann Copestake, Stefan Langer and Sira Palazuelos-Cagigas. Natural Language Processing for Communication Aids: Proceedings of a workshop sponsored by the Association for Computational Linguistics, Association for Computational Linguistics, 1997

John J. Darragh and Ian H. Witten. The reactive keyboard, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Patrick W. Demasco and Kathleen F. McCoy. Generating text from compressed input:an intelligent interface for people with severe motor impediments Communications of the ACM, 35(5), 68--78, 1992

Alistair D. N. Edwards (editor). Extra-Ordinary Human-Computer Interaction, Cambridge University Press, 1995

Lyle L. Lloyd, Donald R. Fuller and Helen H. Arvidson (editors). Augmentative and Alternative Communication: A Handbook of Principles and Practices, Allyn and Bacon, Needham Heights, Mass., 1997.

Filip Loncke, John Clibbens, Helen Arvidson and Lyle Lloyd (editors), Augmentative and Alternative Communication: new directions in research and practice. Whurr Publishers, London, 1999.

John Perry, Elisabeth Macken, Neil Scott, Jan McKinley. Disability, Inability, and Cyberspace. In: Batya Friedman (editor), Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology Cambridge University Press/CSLI, 1997. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~john/disabilities/batya.html

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IRI-9612682. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Ann Copestake aac@csli.stanford.edu
Created: December 12, 1999
Last updated: December 12, 1999