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Intelligent Natural Language Processing: Trends and Applications pp 713–740Cite as

Intelligent Text Processing to Help Readers with Autism

Part of the Studies in Computational Intelligence book series (SCI,volume 740)

Abstract

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has a life-long 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.

Keywords

  • Language technology
  • Autism spectrum disorder
  • Text simplification
  • Text accessibility

Mathematics Subject Classification (2010)

  • Primary 97R40
  • Secondary 91F20

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://openbook.net.

  2. 2.

    http://behavenet.com/apa-diagnostic-classification-dsm-iv-tr.

  3. 3.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa511258.aspx.

  4. 4.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh779072.aspx.

  5. 5.

    A demo of the English sign tagger is available at http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/demos/SignTaggerWebDemo/.

  6. 6.

    Measured using Scarborough’s index of productive syntax [50].

  7. 7.

    http://atlasti.com/.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all the partners to the project. This paper would not have been possible without their contribution to the various stages of the research carried out. We would also like to thank the carers and individuals with high-functioning autism who participated in the different evaluations reported in this paper. The research was partially funded by the EC under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7- ICT-2011.5.5 FIRST 287607).

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  1. Research Institute in Information and Language Processing, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, WV1 1LY, UK

    Constantin Orăsan, Richard Evans & Ruslan Mitkov

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  1. Constantin Orăsan
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  2. Richard Evans
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Correspondence to Constantin Orăsan .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

    Prof. Khaled Shaalan

  2. Faculty of Computers and Information Technology, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt

    Prof. Aboul Ella Hassanien

  3. Faculty of Computers and Information, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

    Fahmy Tolba

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Orăsan, C., Evans, R., Mitkov, R. (2018). Intelligent Text Processing to Help Readers with Autism. In: Shaalan, K., Hassanien, A., Tolba, F. (eds) Intelligent Natural Language Processing: Trends and Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 740. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67056-0_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67056-0_33

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