Intelligent Text Processing to Help Readers with Autism

Abstract

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has a lifelong impact on the lives of people diagnosed with the condition. In many cases, people with ASD are unable to derive the gist or meaning of written documents due to their inability to process complex sentences, understand non-literal text, and understand uncommon and technical terms. This paper presents FIRST, an innovative project which developed language technology (LT) to make documents more accessible to people with ASD. The project has produced a powerful editor which enables carers of people with ASD to prepare texts suitable for this population. Assessment of the texts generated using the editor showed that they are not less readable than those generated more slowly as a result of onerous unaided conversion and were significantly more readable than the originals. Evaluation of the tool shows that it can have a positive impact on the lives of people with ASD.

Automatic Text Simplification for Social Good: Progress and Challenges

“…ATS for Readers with Autism. The FIRST project (2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) was an EC-funded project under the FP7 ICT call concerning smart and personalised inclusion (Orȃsan et al, 2018). It provided OpenBook, a software that can automatically identify a range of language phenomena (e.g.…”

“…The tool supported three languages: English, Spanish, and Bulgarian. Acknowledging that ATS was creating a large number of errors for some texts, and that end users have low tolerance for ungrammatical and erroneous text, OpenBook was also offering powerful post-editing options so that carers can post-edit the texts before showing them to the end users (Orȃsan et al, 2018). The architecture was highly modular, with separate modules for each transformation, to allow for highest level of personalization possible.…”

A Survey of the Perceived Text Adaptation Needs of Adults with Autism

“…In terms of systems aimed at making text more accessible for autistic individuals who are fairly able, the OpenBook tool 1 is the most comprehensive existing system to date. The tool provides semi-automatic conversion of text documents by reducing syntactic complexity and disambiguating meaning by resolving pronominal reference, performing word sense disambiguation and detecting conventional metaphors Orȃsan et al, 2018), with some initial efforts towards concept substitutions for images (Barbu et al, 2015). As part of the research project, the tool was evaluated together with end-users with ASD who were shown to find the adapted texts more accessible than the originals.…”

Sentence Simplification for Semantic Role Labelling and Information Extraction

“…In many cases, text simplification is performed to facilitate subsequent human or machine text processing. This may include processing for human reading comprehension (Canning, 2002;Scarton et al, 2017;Orȃsan et al, 2018) or for NLP tasks such as dependency parsing (Jelínek, 2014), information extraction (Jonnalagadda et al, 2009;Evans, 2011;Peng et al, 2012), semantic role labelling (Vickrey and Koller, 2008), and multidocument summarisation (Blake et al, 2007;Siddharthan et al, 2004).…”

“…eye tracking (Klerke et al, 2015;Timm, 2018), and reading comprehension testing (Orȃsan et al, 2018) to evaluate text simplification systems.…”