A semantic grammar for beginning communicators

Abstract

Beginning communicators are children faced with to the task of language learning. Young, typically developing children are early speakers before the age of 2years, the initial period of communication and language development. When this development is not happening because of disabilities or delays, it is possible to use computer-aided tools in order to help people to palliate or overcome such limitations, at least partially. For example, an Augmentative and Alternative Communication system must manage a vocabulary made up of several hundred concepts, usually without knowledge of the language at a semantic and pragmatic level. Such knowledge would make possible, for example, the implementation of new strategies for word prediction based on meaning, a very precise natural language generation or semantic parsing of the messages so that it would not allow the composition of meaningless messages. We present Simple Upper Ontology, SUpO, a semantic grammar which is made up of detailed knowledge of facts of the everyday life of simple words. In order to build SUpO we developed a procedure designed to give syntactic detail to part of FrameNet, a well-known ontology which encodes knowledge about usages of language at the semantic level. The result of this procedure is a multilingual semantic grammar which has been implemented by using Grammatical Framework. Finally, we propose some examples of tools where the use of SUpO would be suitable.