Reference information
Authors: Sonya Nikolova, Xiaojuan Ma, Marilyn Tremaine and Perry Cook
Where: IUI ’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China
Summary
This paper introduces a vocabulary navigation system called Visual Vocabulary for Aphasia (ViVa) designed for people with lexical access disorders like aphasia. These people have damaged semantic links in their mental lexicons, causing difficulty in acquiring desired words. ViVa attempts to help make word searching easier using a dynamic semantic network, with relations between words reflecting human associations and past vocabulary choices that build off how individuals organize words.ViVa is derived from Lingraphica (LG), an existing commercial assistive communication tool that attempts to mimic real-life situations by grouping words according to shared contexts, which provides some semantic association.
An experiment with sixteen people (seven female) without impairment was conducted to compare LG and ViVa, where participants had to find 164 missing words in 78 phrases using both vocabulary tools. Since ViVa associates related words in addition to categorizing them, the participants agreed that having related words helped them find words faster and most thought that finding words in ViVA was less confusing than searching in LG. The designers also found that users found words with in less time and fewer clicks using ViVa than with LG.
Discussion
I typically enjoy systems or artifacts that are designed for those with handicaps or impairments, and this is no different. Even though evaluation was conducted with able people, and thus inconclusive, it should be expected to show similar results for those with lexical access impairments. I also thought it was good that the designers used existing technology, LG, and attempted to improve upon that, rather than start from scratch.
These systems that aid the disabled while also trying to understand patterns like this are so invaluable. Its cool to see the results of these works.
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