Sonya Nikolova
ABSTRACT
It is challenging to search a dictionary consisting of thousands of entries in order to select appropriate words for building written communication. This is true both for people trying to communicate in a foreign language who have not developed a full vocabulary, for school children learning to write, for authors who wish to be more precise and expressive, and especially for people with lexical access disorders. We make vocabulary navigation and word finding easier by augmenting a basic vocabulary with links between words based on human judgments of semantic similarity. In this paper, we report the results from a user study evaluating how our system named ViVA performs compared to a widely used assistive vocabulary in which words are organized hierarchically into common categories.
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Index Terms
- Vocabulary navigation made easier
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Reviews
Mariana Damova
The purpose of the reported research is to present a visual vocabulary for people with aphasia that models the speaker's mental lexicon and enables quick word finding. The paper is a good contribution to the field of assistive communication, as it describes and argues for an approach to facilitate vocabulary access in assistive vocabularies. The visual vocabulary developed for aphasia (ViVA) compensates for broken semantic links in the mental lexicon of people with aphasia "by organizing words in a dynamic semantic network." In this network, the connections between words reflect human judgments of semantic similarity. "Theories that explain how the human mind organizes words" are used to organize the words. The authors provide the following example: Spreading network activation models assume that presenting a prime stimulus word activates the corresponding representation in lexical memory and that this activation spreads to other related nodes. The implemented solution contains semantic networks that overlay a basic hierarchical vocabulary. The links between the words reflect associations based on a measure reflecting "how much one word brings to mind another word." The lexical database WordNet is used in the implementation. Nikolova et al. conduct an experiment that evaluates the efficiency of the method by comparing access to words with two vocabularies. The results show that it takes significantly less time to find a word using the ViVA vocabulary than using concept hierarchies. A post-experiment questionnaire reveals that "all participants agreed that having related words automatically suggested helped them find words faster" and that finding words with ViVA was less confusing than searching with a previously available hierarchical concept vocabulary. The main contribution of the paper is a method for assisting communication for people with lexical access impairments. This method can also aid foreign language learners. The paper should interest linguists and professionals in the field of assistive communication. Online Computing Reviews Service
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