Mauricio Fontana de Vargas


2021

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Automated Generation of Storytelling Vocabulary from Photographs for use in AAC
Mauricio Fontana de Vargas | Karyn Moffatt
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Research on the application of NLP in symbol-based Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) tools for improving social interaction support is scarce. We contribute a novel method for generating context-related vocabulary from photographs of personally relevant events aimed at supporting people with language impairments in retelling their past experiences. Performance was calculated with information retrieval concepts on the relevance of vocabulary generated for communicating a corpus of 9730 narrative phrases about events depicted in 1946 photographs. In comparison to a baseline generation composed of frequent English words, our method generated vocabulary with a 4.6 gain in mean average precision, regardless of the level of contextual information in the input photographs, and 6.9 for photographs in which contextual information was extracted correctly. We conclude by discussing how our findings provide insights for system optimization and usage.
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