TITLE:		INTELLIGENT AAC SYSTEMS: WHAT CAN BE DONE NOW
AUTHORS:	Kathleen F. McCoy, Eric H. Nyberg, Bruce R. Baker
COMMENTS:	(c) 1990 RESNA Press. Reprinted with permission.


ABSTRACT:
With the advent of smaller, more powerful computers, it is becoming
possible to develop AAC systems which take advantage of Artificial
Intelligence and Computational Linguistics techniques. In particular,
we envision the development of an 'intelligent' AAC system that can
understand the operator's input well enough to infer what words or
syntactic structure may be omitted or missing, enabling the device to
output a complete and correct sentence from partial input. At some
point in the future it may be possible to create an AAC system with
all of the linguistic knowledge of a human speaker, but the
limitations of existing theory and technology allow only a small
subset of that knowledge to be incorporated in current systems. In
this paper we explore some of the possibilities for AAC systems that
could be developed given the present state of affairs. Of course, each
of the possibilities must contain trade-offs of one kind or
another. We discuss various populations of potential AAC system
operators and show how different populations would benefit from
different aspects of 'intelligence' in their system.