Improving vocabulary organization in assistive communication tools: a mixed-initiative approach

Authors:
Sonya Nikolova
Affiliations:
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Venue:
ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Navigating a vocabulary consisting of thousands of entries in order to select appropriate words for building communication is challenging for individuals with lexical access impairments like those caused by aphasia. Ineffective vocabulary organization and navigation hurt the usability and adoption of assistive communication tools and ultimately fail to help users engage in practical communication. We have developed a multi-modal visual vocabulary that enables improved navigation and effective word finding by modeling a speaker's "mental lexicon", where words are stored and organized in ways that allow efficient access and retrieval. Due to impaired links in their mental lexicon, people with aphasia have persistent difficulties accessing and retrieving words that express intended concepts. The Visual Vocabulary for Aphasia (ViVA) attempts to compensate for some of these missing or impaired semantic connections by organizing words in a dynamic semantic network where links between words reflect word association measures based on WordNet, human judgments of semantic similarity, and past vocabulary usage.