Abstract
In order to enable or facilitate online communication for people with Intellectual Disabilities, the Text-to-Pictograph translation system automatically translates Dutch written text into a series of Sclera or Beta pictographs. The baseline system presents the reader with a more or less verbatim pictograph-per-word translation. As a result, long and complex input sentences lead to long and complex pictograph translations, leaving the end users confused and distracted. To overcome these problems, we developed a rule-based simplification system for Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation. Our evaluations show a large improvement over the baseline.
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Notes
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Note that our users were already familiar with (at least one of) the pictograph sets. Beta and Sclera pictographs are often used in schools, daycare centres, and sheltered workshops in Belgium, primarily to depict activities or the daily menu on printed schedules, or to provide step-by-step instructions for people with ID.
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With the exception of a corpus for sentence compression for Dutch subtitles [9]. However, as we already remarked, compression is not the same as simplification, and this corpus was not developed for people with Intellectual Disabilities.
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We did not evaluate using manually simplified reference translations, because multiple acceptable simplifications are possible, especially with respect to the order of the syntactic constituents.
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HTER is the minimum edit distance between the machine translation and its manually post-edited version.
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We refer to van Noord et al. [16] for an evaluation of the Alpino parser.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Agentschap Innoveren & Ondernemen and the European Commissions CIP for funding Leen Sevens doctoral research and Able-To-Include, which allows further development and valorisation of the tools. We also thank the people from WAI-NOT for their valuable feedback and the integration of the tools on their website. Finally, we would like to thank our users.
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Sevens, L., Vandeghinste, V., Schuurman, I., Van Eynde, F. (2017). Simplified Text-to-Pictograph Translation for People with Intellectual Disabilities. In: Frasincar, F., Ittoo, A., Nguyen, L., Métais, E. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59569-6_21
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