Sag, I., H. Clark, A. Copestake, D. Flickinger, R. Malouf and J. Carroll (1999) `Natural language generation for a speech prosthesis'. Poster at National Science Foundation Human-Computer Interaction Program Grantees' Workshop, Orlando, Florida.
Many people who cannot speak because of physical disability utilize
text-to-speech generators as prosthetic devices. However, users of
speech prostheses often have more general loss of motor control, and
despite aids such as word prediction, text entry is slow and difficult.
For typical users, current speech prostheses have output rates less than
a tenth of the speed of normal speech. This prevents natural social
conversation, since it completely disrupts the usual processes of
turn-taking, and can lead to negative effects on the listener's attitude
to the prosthesis user.
The main focus of this research is the investigation of techniques which
can improve text input rates sufficiently for more natural conversation
to be possible, without sacrificing flexibility of content. This new
approach employs a combination of a wide-coverage grammar,
corpus-based word frequency data, and conversational templates.
Applied to speech prosthesis, it enables the production of full
sentences from minimal user input in a context-sensitive way. We call
this technique cogeneration.
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