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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:blue'>Sonya Nikolova will present her
preFPO on Wednesday December 2 at 10AM in Room 402.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:blue'>The members of her committee
are: Perry Cook, advisor; Marilyn Tremaine (Rutgers) and <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:blue'>Christiane Fellbaum, readers; Adam
Finkelstein and Szymon Rusinkiewicz, nonreaders.</span> <span
style='color:blue'> Everyone <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='color:blue'>is invited to attend her
talk. Her abstract follows below. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>*****<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>Title and Abstract:<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>Improving Vocabulary Organization in Assistive Communication
Tools: A Mixed-Initiative Approach<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>Navigating a vocabulary consisting of thousands of entries
in order to select appropriate words for building communication is challenging
for individuals with lexical access disorders like those caused by aphasia, a
cognitive disorder. Most existing assistive communication vocabularies have a
lexical organization scheme based on a simple list of words. Some word
collections are organized in hierarchies which often leads to deep and
confusing searches; others are simply a list of arbitrary categories which
causes excessive scrolling and a sense of disorganization. Ineffective
vocabulary organization and navigation hurt the usability and adoption of
assistive communication tools and ultimately fail to help users engage in
practical communication.<o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>We have developed a multi-modal visual vocabulary that
enables improved navigation and effective word finding by modeling a
speaker’s “mental lexicon”, where words are stored and
organized in ways that allow efficient access and retrieval. Due to impaired
links in their mental lexicon, people with aphasia have persistent difficulties
accessing and retrieving words that express intended concepts. The Visual
Vocabulary for Aphasia (ViVA) attempts to compensate for some of these missing
or impaired semantic connections by organizing words in a dynamic semantic
network where links between words reflect semantic association measures based
on WordNet, human judgments of semantic similarity, and past vocabulary
usage. <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>ViVA is both adaptable, able to be customized by the user,
and adaptive, able to dynamically change to better suit users’ past
actions and future needs. This mixed-initiative approach enables the user to
feel in control by making changes and anticipating ones that have been
initiated by the system while still allowing adaptive methods to help determine
where and when changes are required. ViVA’s adaptable component allows
the user to add and remove vocabulary items, and group them in personalized
categories. The adaptive component updates the semantic network according to
vocabulary usage, user preferences, and a number of semantic association
measures. Thus, ViVA tailors the vocabulary organization according to both
user-specific information and general knowledge of human semantic memory. <o:p></o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal>We report results from two studies evaluating how ViVA
compares to a vocabulary access system in which words are organized
hierarchically into common categories. Since our target user population is
people with cognitive impairments, further work involves studying the effect of
adaptation on users’ cognitive load and investigating the tradeoff
between improved navigation and changing vocabulary structure due to
adaptation.<o:p></o:p></p>
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