Study of Utterance Support System using Word Input based on Word Prediction

Abstract

Speech is very important for us to communicate with others. However, because of speech handicaps, there are many people who feel it difficult. Thus, we set our main purpose to study new utterance support system working on an information terminal. To make this system more effective, we made word prediction and added fixed phrase dictionary and class 2-gram as additional functions. Fixed phrase dictionary includes phrases often used in daily life conversations and class 2-gram using co-occurrence frequencies of 9 parts of speech in Japanese. And by using class 2-gram, we made two additional functions. One is generating next candidates and another is changing frequency. We did three evaluation experiments – necessary numbers of input, input speed and measurement experiments of voice synthesis. And results shows that our system needs less numbers of input but slower than other methods and it is faster to do voice synthesis when user input a sentence than other timing. Hereafter, we intend to create more effective dictionaries, improve class 2-gram and develop new GUI to make our system more effective and faster.