A communication tool for people with disabilities: lexical semantics for filling in the pieces

The goal of this project is to provide a communication tool for people with severe speech and motor impairments (SSMI). The tool will facilitate the formation of syntactically correct sentences in the fewest number of keystrokes. Consider the situation where an individual is using a word-based augmentative communication system—each word is (basically) one keystroke and morphological endings etc. require additional keystrokes. Our prototype system is intended to reduce the burden of the user by allowing him/her to select only the uninflected content words of the desired sentence. The system is responsible for adding proper function words (e.g., articles, prepositions) and necessary morphological endings. In order to accomplish this task, the system attempts to generate a semantic representation of an utterance under circumstances where syntactic (parse tree) information is not available because the input to the system is a compressed telegraphic message rather than a standard English sentence. The representation is used by the system to generate a full English sentence from the compressed input. The focus of the paper is on the knowledge and processing necessary to produce a semantic representation under these telegraphic constraints.