Natural Language Generation and Assistive Technologies

Some people with disabilities find it difficult to access some forms of language. Assistive Technology is a term used to describe a class of technologies/interventions designed to enable people with disabilities to do things that their disabilitie currently make difficult. A large amount of work on Assistive Technology has focused on enabling access to language and communication; this class of interventions could greatly benefit from Natural Language Generation technologies. This talk will briefly survey some Assistive Technology applications that have employed Natural Language Generation technologies – highlighting some of the needs in this application area along with the opportunities that it provides for investigating hard problems in Natural Language Generation. It will then highlight a project, called the SIGHT System, intended to provide access to information graphics (e.g., bar charts, line graphs) found in popular media to people who have visual impairments. This system employs Natural Language Generation technologies to generate appropriate textual summaries of the information graphics. As such, it makes contributions to several areas within the field of Natural Language Generation while also enabling access to the information in these graphics to people who cannot access it with visual means.