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<Paper uid="C82-2010">
  <Title>DIVe~OPING A READING MACHINE FOR ~ BLIND</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
DIVe~OPING A READING MACHINE FOR ~ BLIND
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> M. Boot Inst. of Applied and Computational Linguistics. WilhelmADapark 11/12, 3581 NC Utrecht The develo~aent of a readi~ machine for the blind implies the solution of problems on such diverse fields as linguistics, micro computing and ergonomics. Because of the stats of the art in Computational Lin&amp;qaist$cs, however, the lin~qaistic problems turn out to be the major draw bask in this field of scientific endeavor. That is the reason why the paper for the greater part is devoted to the description of a new model for automated phonemization. This model is applied to Dutch. The model was developed for words only. Thus, the reading manhins as it stands now is able to pronounce a series of words e Therefore, the texts read into the computer are treated as a series of single words by the reading machine. The proble~ of prosody e:ce not tackled uptil! news On the other hand, all problems concerning assimilation in ths words have been 8olvedo The computer program that performs this te~k is called YONGRAF. It was developed at the University of Utrecht. The computer program FONGRAF is able to perform a transcription of written text into the phonematic foxiest according to the principles of phonematic transorPSption. The paper fooueses on the design of the prepare and enswers questions concerning the relation between the technical part (implamentation) and the linguistic considerations behind the computer progj~em.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> It is argued that in the past computer programs performing this linguistic task were principally designed from the - 46implementation point of view. This has led to computer programs wi~h a strong ad hoc kind of problem solving part in it. Therefore,these computer prod, rams turn out to be not adaptable tO new situations and unforeseen mistakes.ln this paper it is argued that for the solution of linguistic problems of this kind a pattern mato~-tng computer program has to be developed. It should go without saying that a computer designed for lin6~istio purposes should be firmly based on the linguistic analysis of the task. As far as the search for regularities in the phonetic interpretation of written text is concerned we used the phonological theory as an important aid. The phonological description of the Dutch language was used as the most important source for the definition of the pattern marcher in the computer program FONGRAP. Many of the observed regularities regarding the Dutch phoneme distribution and phonologloal rules concerning the phonetic interpretation of the phonological forms of Dutch morphemes are particularly useful to our problem in that they state the surroundings which affect a particular phoneme. For instance the assimilation rule that a consonant becomes voiceless or voiced according to the &amp;quot;voice&amp;quot; of the following consonant. This kind of rules applies even in surroundings where the syllable boundaries are involved. This is the reason why we consider the application of hyphenation programs to be out of place as far as the solution of the phonematization problem for Dutch words is concerned, This also is the main reason why we developed a pattern matching computer program. A further advantage of the pattern matching program is that it is easy to implement &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; regularities. With the notion &amp;quot;new&amp;quot; regularities we refer to rules and regularities not described b~ normal phonology. Those regularities often are caused by the fact that a computer is too &amp;quot;literal&amp;quot;. Native speakers will, e.g. not confuse any letter-sequence oi_~r or isc_._hh as in hooi_._~k and macaronlsch_.__otel with the suffixes oi__~r and ise~ho A computer, however, does not have this linguistic knowledge. Thus, one has to design means to implem- 47 ent this knoWledge. This is done by the definition of patterns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In the paper we shortly refer to the eolutPSon of prcnuncPSatPSon 8rabidity caused by semantic reasonm. The computer pro~ea FONGRAP w~s tested with the help of a variety of corpus~s consisting of natural le~guage texts, The results of these tests are reportedo - 48 -</Paragraph>
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