Communication Aid for Autistic From Pictures to English sentences

Abstract

Over past few years, Natural Language Generation has been receiving a lot of attention from researchers for various applications but English sentence generation for Autistics communications has received minimal attention. This research paper presents a novel approach for sentence generation using “revised Purdom’s algorithm” in view of autistic children to generate sentences that are both syntactically and semantically correct. Autism or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disability, specifically found in children that results in problems related to communication and social skills. Due to this disability an autistic child feel isolated and face difficulty in communicating with others or lead a normal life. Most of the current approaches for NLG and NLP mainly focus on generation of grammatically correct sentences with little attention being paid to semantics. The aim of this research is to restructure the “revised Purdom’s algorithm” to include concept of probabilities and pool of sentences (specific or generic) to generate both grammatical and semantically correct sentences. Probabilities are calculated for the user selected words (nouns) to determine its position in the sentence by making use of a pre-prepared list of sentences. This list of sentences is further refined based on user selected words. This is further used to calculate probability to determine occurrence of a word (noun) in a sentence. Once determined, sentences are generated using grammar/production rules given. The proposed revised algorithm has been further implemented for testing and evaluation. Results of our research showed that 68% of the generated sentences were grammatically and semantically correct. Furthermore, another evaluation was performed by generating sentences using both revised Purdom’s algorithm and our semantic-based algorithm. II Results and comparison showed that semantic-based algorithm was able to produce more accurate sentences and is independent of the order of the selected words whereas the revised Purdom’s algorithm is highly dependent on the orders of the words.