Abstract

It is both a legal and conscientious responsibility of the society to enable children with disabilities to have access to and receive education and training as easily and effectively as possible. Assistive technology offers great opportunities for disabled students to participate in educational activities fully and adequately. This paper presents a software tool developed to assist the education and training of autistic and mentally retarded children. The tool is intended to help the disabled child establish the bridge between expressions and the concepts they refer to via relevant images. Taking into consideration the fact that enabling the user to interact with the system using natural language expressions will be much more effective compared to a system constraining the communication to a limited set of isolated keywords, the tool has been equipped with a Natural Language Processing (NLP) module. This module functions as the backbone of the tool. It analyzes natural language expressions into semantic frames using a unificationbased grammar. Input expressions are mapped onto relevant images via the mediation of semantic frames. As these semantics frames represent the content of images, rather than their formal aspects, the system is able to operate on a flexible basis.