Generating acceptable Arabic Core Vocabularies and Symbols for AAC users

Abstract

This paper discusses the development of an Arabic Symbol Dictionary for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) users, their families, carers, therapists and teachers as well as those who may benefit from the use of symbols to enhance literacy skills. With a requirement for a bi-lingual dictionary, a vocabulary list analyzer has been developed to evaluate similarities and differences in word frequencies from a range of word lists in order to collect suitable AAC lexical entries. An online bespoke symbol management has been created to hold the lexical entries alongside specifically designed symbols which are then accepted via a voting system using a series of criteria. Results to date have highlighted how successful these systems can be when encouraging participation along with the need for further research into the development of personalised context sensitive core vocabularies.

Designing electronic graphic symbol-based AAC systems: a scoping review. Part 1: system description

“…As a result, additional development and adaptations are usually needed before such a symbol system can be used to represent another language, as vocabulary and grammatical elements differ between languages. For example, the agglutinative structure of the Turkish language makes many of the available symbol libraries unsuitable to adequately represent the language [33]. Furthermore, the visual nature of symbols lends itself to representing concepts in a way that is aligned to a specific geographical context and culture, and this may not translate to other geographical contexts and cultures [33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

“…For example, the agglutinative structure of the Turkish language makes many of the available symbol libraries unsuitable to adequately represent the language [33]. Furthermore, the visual nature of symbols lends itself to representing concepts in a way that is aligned to a specific geographical context and culture, and this may not translate to other geographical contexts and cultures [33][34][35][36][37][38]. Food, modes of transport, building styles, weather, clothing, religion and conventions around celebrations (e.g., weddings) are some of the obvious differences between cultures and geographical contexts.…”