TITLE: 		ORGANIZATION OF PRE-STORED TEXT IN ALTERNATIVE AND
		AUGMENTATIVE COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS: AN INTERACTIVE
		SCHEMA-BASED APPROACH
AUTHORS:	Peter Bryan Vanderheyden
COMMENTS:	Master's Thesis; ASEL Technical Report

ABSTRACT:
The field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is
concerned with assisting individuals with severe physical and language
impairments to communicate more effectively. Existing AAC systems make
use of a variety of approaches to accelerate sentence generation,
including different selection methods, encoding strategies, and
natural language processing. Augmented communicators continue to
produce words at a very slow rate, and have difficulty participating
actively in conversation.

However, only recently have AAC systems begun to make use of the
predictable patterns that occur in conversation. To date, such systems
have focussed on either highly constrained and relatively content-free
utterances, or on loosely structured, monologue type text.

This thesis develops an alternative but compatible approach to
facilitating conver sational participation in AAC which attempts to
target a broader range of conversations, representing both their
content and structure. Motivated by schema theory, this approach
applies schema structures to the domain of conversation. A set of
structures is proposed with which text from past conversations can be
made available for reuse.

To demonstrate this approach, a prototype is developed and
evaluated. The prototype behaves as an interface that augments a
user's current AAC system by providing access to conversational
schemata created and updated by the user. In the evaluation study, two
individuals used the interface while taking part in a series of mock
job interviews. Results of the study were encouraging.