Abstract Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) is an area focused in the rehabilitation of people suffering from different kinds of disorders and disabilities related with language and communication. According to latest estimates of the World Health Organization, the most of countries do not have appropriate structures, and enough personnel and resources to provide healthcare and rehabilitation services these persons. This problem is more complex... Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) is an area focused in the rehabilitation of people suffering from different kinds of disorders and disabilities related with language and communication. According to latest estimates of the World Health Organization, the most of countries do not have appropriate structures, and enough personnel and resources to provide healthcare and rehabilitation services these persons. This problem is more complex in developing countries, given that a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) must to carry out several activities besides providing the therapy as such. On those grounds, this paper presents a robotic assistant able to provide support for SLPs during the execution of several activities related with the SLT such as: patient’s progress monitoring, interacting with patients suffering from emotional and behavioural disorders, report generation, and in general, supporting the execution of different kinds of therapy activities (visual, motor, and auditory stimulation, relaxation activities, etc.). This approach is based on an integrative environment that relies on mobile ICT tools, an expert system, a knowledge layer and standardized vocabularies. This proposal has been tested on 65 children suffering from different types of disabilities, and the achieved results are encouraging. Read More Read Less

Abstract Yorùbá standard orthography involves heavy use of diacritics for tone marking and representation of characters that are beyond ANSI scope. The diacritics are not always applied in many Yorùbá documents because specialized and language-dependent input devices for the language are very rarely available. Hence, this study aims at explicating the statistical implication of the inconsistency in the use of diacritics in electronic Yoruba... Yorùbá standard orthography involves heavy use of diacritics for tone marking and representation of characters that are beyond ANSI scope. The diacritics are not always applied in many Yorùbá documents because specialized and language-dependent input devices for the language are very rarely available. Hence, this study aims at explicating the statistical implication of the inconsistency in the use of diacritics in electronic Yoruba documents on the distribution of word in the two versions of its texts. This was achieved by modeling the texts of Yoruba language based on Zipf’s and Heap’s law on the n-grams (for n=1, 2 and 3) with corporal of 1,089,318 words that are diacritically marked and its version that are unmarked diacritically. It was observed that the Zipf’s graphs of the two corporal exhibited no significant difference. On the other hand, the Heap’s graphs of the diacritized and undiacritized texts deviated significantly from the base. This shows that the use of the diacritics significantly affect single word distribution of the language but the effect reduced in the distribution of co-occurrences of two or more words. Read More Read Less

Abstract Syntactic ambiguity is a common problem in Arabic language. We are exploring the possibility of using corpus based word collocation data to predict different interpretations of a potentially ambiguous sentence in Arabic. As a case study, we address the problem of disambiguating coordination structures in Arabic to determine how the external modifier (adjective) applies to the coordinated words (nouns) like القطط والكلاب السوداء... Syntactic ambiguity is a common problem in Arabic language. We are exploring the possibility of using corpus based word collocation data to predict different interpretations of a potentially ambiguous sentence in Arabic. As a case study, we address the problem of disambiguating coordination structures in Arabic to determine how the external modifier (adjective) applies to the coordinated words (nouns) like القطط والكلاب السوداء (black cats and dogs). In this paper, we report on an empirical study in which participants were presented with a sequence of trials, each of which consists a potentially ambiguous sentence followed by a comprehension question that relates to the preceding sentence. The study reveals that lexical co-occurrence information, derived using Kilgarriff’s Sketch Engine operated on a ca. 1.7 millions words Arabic Web Corpus, can be used to predict the most likely interpretation of a potentially ambiguous sentence. Read More Read Less