TITLE: APPLYING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES TO AUGMENTATIVE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS AUTHORS: Kathleen McCoy, Patrick Demasco, Mark Jones, Christopher Pennington and Charles Rowe COMMENTS: From Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 1990 ABSTRACT: A large population of non-speaking, motor-impaired individuals must rely on computer-based communication aids. These aids, in essence, present the user with a list of letters, words, or phrases that may be selected to compose the desired utterance. The resulting utterance may then be passed to a speech synthesizer or document preparation system. While many of these individuals desire to communicate in complete well-formed sentences, the expenditure in effort and time is often prohibitive. The goal of this project is to increase the communication rate of physically disabled individuals by cutting down the number of items that must be selected in order to compose a well-formed utterance. We wish to do this while placing as little a burden on the user as possible. Input to our system are the uninflected content words of the desired utterance, consider, 'APPLE EAT JOHN'. The system first employs a semantic parser to form a semantic representation of the input. In this example, the parser must recognize that EAT can be a verb which accepts an animate ACTOR and an inanimate/food OBJECT. The resulting semantic representation (along with a specification of the original word order) is then passed to the translator which is responsible for replacing the semantic terms with their language-specific instantiations. The final phase of processing is a sentence generator which attempts to form a syntactically correct sentence that retains the general order of the original input producing, for example, 'THE APPLE IS EATEN BY JOHN' In this paper we discuss the three processing phases described above as well as examples illustrating the current capabilities of the system.