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Write:Talk |
AUTHORS
David A O’Mara & Annalu Waller, Department of Applied
Computing, Dundee University, Scotland.
Graeme Ritchie, Division of Informatics Artificial Intelligence,
Edinburgh University, Scotland.
ABSTRACT
Children with severe communication disorders miss out on the experience of actively telling their own stories. Good communication is an interactive experience of listening, responding and turn taking, not something that is easily achieved with voice output devices. Pre-programming sentences which may or may not reflect the individuals real thoughts has been one way in which the non-speakers voice can be heard. A musical analogy can be made here - with practically zero knowledge of how to read or produce music, synthesiser technology has enabled the most tone deaf, musically illiterate person to produce pretty amazing sounds by simply pressing a button. Give the same person a traditional piano and we have a very different scenario - the point being that he or she is still musically illiterate. Wherever possible, the ideal would be to give the individual a real understanding of the underlying processes taking place.
Interactional conversation (Cheepen, 1988), which is characterised by free narrative and phatic communication (greetings, farewells, etc), allows us to go beyond casual acquaintance into firm friendship and meaningful relationships. The need to engage in story telling led to the development of a story based communication system called Talk:About (Waller et al, 1998).
The Talk:About software package allows the user’s own pre-stored written material to be used in interactive conversation. Stories are given appropriate "topics" and "people" tags which can then be used to retrieve specific material. Frequency and recent use are also used for retrieval. Fast greetings, needs and wants are handled by a Quick:Chat feature which provides an icon based interface. Talk:About is complemented by word prediction software.
A recent evaluation of the system by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers has shown positive results in increasing non-verbal children’s interactive communication skills (Waller et al, 1999). An important aspect of the research was how the idea of story telling could be introduced in a way which would motivate the user to learn the system.
Introducing the concept of story telling to a non-speaking child who often has not had the opportunity to develop language naturally is a problem. One solution was provided by a Talk:About user. CH (a young girl) indicated that she wanted to copy a book of jokes into her system. All children, of all abilities, appear to love nothing better than to tell jokes - old jokes, new jokes, variations, puns and riddles - the language of the playground! CH was able to experience this stage of development when she was able to relate jokes by herself using the speech synthesiser.
Jokes are a special type of story and many jokes have a set form and structure (e.g. ‘Knock-knock’ jokes). This has led us to investigate the development of a system which will provide user support in both the creation and narration of jokes. Such a system will allow the user to produce jokes and puns - both as an introduction to the idea of story-telling and experience of the conversation aid itself. Interaction will also be facilitated as telling a joke is a two-way process (what would be the point in keeping it to yourself!).
Researchers at Edinburgh University have developed a computer program, JAPE (Joke Analysis and Production Engine, see Binsted et al, 1997), which generates simple punning riddles. Using a computer programme inspired by JAPE, the concepts behind using stories for interaction will be introduced with the help of the automatic introduction of jokes and riddles. The JAPE researchers note that human-assisted pun generation is possible by prompting the user for typical associations, such as asking the user what a bomb typically does (explode?), rather than relying on a lexicon. It is envisaged that such a system could form the basis of a ‘joke assistant’ which would provide non-speaking children with access to interactive conversational material.
The preliminary ideas behind using joke-telling for story development will be discussed followed by demonstration of how a joke generator component in a communication device would be used - fun as both an educator and motivator in the social development of individuals who may have previously "not got the joke".
REFERENCES