The Compansion technique is a syntactically and semantically-based AAC
method that generates complete well-formed sentences from a user input
of uninflected content words. It has applications both as a rate
enhancement technique for people who use word or picture based systems
(it reduces the number of keystrokes and the number of word forms
needed) and as a tool for people learning language who do not yet have
good grammatical skills.
Table of Contents |
Contributors
|
The goal of this project is to increase the communication rate of
people with severe disabilities via natural language processing
techniques. We have developed a technique called Compansion which
expands a compressed (telegraphic) sequence of words (input by the
user) into a semantically and syntactically well-formed utterance. At
the same time, we wish to do this by placing as little a burden on the
user as possible. Thus, we are not interested in a simple coding
system where sentences have been stored and are indexed by their
content words.
Input from the user will be the roots of the content words of the
desired utterance; thus, many function words including determiners
(e.g., the, a) and prepositions (e.g., of, in) will normally be left
out. The system is responsible for filling in missing words as well as
correctly conjugating the verb and forming a syntactically correct
utterance. We attempt to form an utterance whose word order most
closely reflects the word order given in the original input
string. For example, if the system is given "APPLE EAT JOHN," we would
like the system to produce the sentence, "THE APPLE IS EATEN BY JOHN."
The Compansion project has been divided into four phases. The
syntactic parser phase accepts input from the user and enhances it to
designate modifier/clause attachments, compound noun structures, and
in some cases, word sense disambiguation (sometimes resulting in
multiple output structures). In the next phase, the semantic parser,
the output from the syntactic parser is placed into a well-formed
semantic structure. This phase is responsible for determining what
role (semantic relationship) is played by each word of the input. To
illustrate, in the example above, the parser recognizes that EAT is a
verb that prefers an animate ACTOR and an inanimate/food OBJECT.
The semantic structure built from this phase is passed to the
translator phase which is responsible for determining how each piece
of the semantic structure can be realized in English. The translator
is responsible for adding language specific information to the
semantic structure and for translating that structure into a
representation appropriate for the sentence generation phase. The
sentence generator uses a functional unification grammar to generate
an English sentence from the specification constructed by the
translator.
A full prototype of the Compansion system has been completed in Common
Lisp and tested. Although the range of syntactic forms is not
exhaustive, Compansion does handle declarative sentences that include
multiple adjectives, prepositional phrases, possessive noun phrases,
direct and indirect objects, and some verbal clauses (e.g., "I want to
go to the store"). Questions, imperatives, complex verb tenses, and
do-support are also provided. The present system has a vocabulary of
over 1000 words and has the capability to infer the verb or subject in
some situations. In addition, Compansion has been augmented to
understand some metaphorical verb uses. A graphical interface
emulating a word-based communication device has also been designed to
demonstrate Compansion at conferences and for visitors at ASEL.
Discussions with the Prentke Romich Company and Semantic Compaction
Systems have centered on taking some of the technology developed in
this project and transferring it into the development of an
intelligent therapy tool. Such an application provides us with a
limited domain that allows us to fully specify the lexical knowledge
required. Part of the technology developed in this project has been
implemented in C++ which makes it available for quick and efficient
transfer to future applications.
McCoy, K. F., & Demasco, P. (1995) Some applications of
natural language processing to the field of augmentative and
alternative communication. In Proceedings of the IJCAI
'95 Workshop on Developing AI Applications for Disabled People
(pp. 97-112). Montreal, Canada.
Pennington, C. A. (1995) Providing intelligent language
feedback for augmentative communication users. In
Proceedings of the IJCAI '95 Workshop on Developing AI
Applications for Disabled People (pp. 125-136). Montreal,
Canada.
Jones, M. A. (1994) Transparently-motivated metaphor
generation (a Ph.D. dissertation). Technical Report 94-29,
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of
Delaware, Newark, DE.
McCoy, K. F., Demasco, P. W., Jones, M. A., Pennington, C.A.,
Vanderheyden, P. B., & Zickus, W. M. (1994). A
communication tool for people with disabilities: Lexical semantics for
filling in the pieces. In Proceedings of the ASSETS
'94. Marina del Rey, CA.
McCoy, K. F., McKnitt, W. M., Peischl, D. M., Pennington, C. A.,
Vanderheyden, P. B., & Demasco, P. W. (1994) AAC-user
therapist interactions: Preliminary linguistic observations and
implications for compansion. In M. Binion (Ed.),
Proceedings of the RESNA '94 Annual Conference
(pp. 129-131). Arlington, VA: RESNA Press.
Jones, M. A. (1993).Transparently-motivated metaphor
generation (a Ph.D. proposal). Technical Report 93-14,
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of
Delaware, Newark, DE.
Demasco, P. W., & McCoy, K. F. (1992). Generating text
from compressed input: An intelligent interface for people with severe
motor impairments. Communications of the ACM,
35(5), 68-78.
Jones, M. A. (1992). Generating a specific class of
metaphors. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting
of the Association of Computational Linguistics
(pp. 321-323). University of Delaware, Newark, DE.
Jones, M., & McCoy, K. F. (1992). Transparently-motivated
metaphor generation. In R. Dale et al. (eds.),
Automated Natural Language Generation, 6th International
Workshop on Natural Language Generation (pp. 231-246). Berlin /
Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Jones, M., McCoy, K., & Demasco, P. (1992). The problem of
metaphor in intelligent AAC systems. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.),
Proceedings of the RESNA International '92 Conference
(pp. 363-365). Washington, D.C: RESNA Press.
Demasco, P., McCoy, K. F., Jones, M., Pennington, C., & Snyder,
S. (1991). Compansion: A technique that applies natural
language processing to augmentative
communication. Rehabilitation R & D Progress
Reports / Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development,
29, 180-181.
Jones, M., Demasco, P., McCoy, K., &
Pennington. C. (1991).Knowledge representation considerations
for a domain independent semantic parser. In J.J. Presperin
(Ed.), Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual RESNA
Conference (pp. 109-111). Washington, D.C: RESNA Press.
Demasco, P., McCoy, K.F., Jones, M., Pennington, C., & Stum,
G. (1990). Rate enhancement through sentence
compansion. Rehabilitation R & D Progress Reports /
Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development, 28,
197.
McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Jones, M., Pennington, C., & Rowe,
C. (1990). Applying natural language processing techniques to
augmentative communication system. In H. Karlgren (Ed.),
Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on
Computational Linguistics (pp. 413-415). Morristown, NJ:
Association of Computational Linguistics.
McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Jones, M., Pennington, C., & Rowe,
C. (1990). A domain independent semantic parser for
compansion. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.), Proceedings of the
Thirteenth Annual RESNA Conference (pp. 187-188). Washington,
D.C: RESNA Press.
Demasco, P., McCoy, K., Gong, Y., & Pennington,
C. (1989). Towards more intelligent AAC interfaces: The use of
natural language processing. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.),
Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual RESNA Conference
(pp. 27-30). Washington, D.C: RESNA Press.
McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Gong, Y., Pennington, C., & Rowe,
C. (1989). A semantic parser for understanding ill-formed
input. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.), Proceedings of the
Twelfth Annual RESNA Conference (pp. 35-37). Washington, D.C:
RESNA Press.
McCoy, K., Demasco, P., Gong, Y., Pennington, C., & Rowe,
C. (1989). Toward a communication device which generates
sentences. In J.J. Presperin (Ed.), Proceedings of the
Twelfth Annual RESNA Conference (pp. 41-43). Washington, D.C:
RESNA Press.
[abstract], [text (48K)], [postscript (158K)]
[abstract],
[text (30K)],
[postscript
(95K)]
[abstract], [postscript (690K)]
[abstract]
[abstract], [text (13K)], [postscript (75K)]
[abstract], [postscript (351K)]
[abstract], [text (50K)], [postscript (125K)]
[abstract]
[abstract]
[abstract], [text (14K)], [postscript (79K)]
[abstract], [text 4K], [postscript (51K)]
[abstract], [text 14K], [postscript (79K)]
[abstract], [text (3K)], [postscript (49K)]
[abstract]
[abstract], [text (14K)], [postscript (61K)]
[abstract], [text (11K)], [postscript (61K)]
[abstract], [text (8K)], [postscript (57K)]