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<Paper uid="W97-0507">
  <Title>I Using NLP in the design of a conversation aid for non-speaking children</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> It is difficult to develop an effective computer-based aid to enable children whose speech is hard to understand to participate in social conversations. Such children require a relatively simple device that will enable them to select and produce suitable content for a conversation in real time. We are investigating how an analysis of children's language can be used in the design of such a device. In particular, we believe that an analysis of the pragmatics of children's conversations will provide a basis for predicting from a corpus of plausible utterances those utterances that will be most useful for a particular child. Such an analysis may also be useful for subsequently predicting and locating which of these pre-loaded utterances is likely to be required next during a particular conversation. In addition, we are interested in using computer-based training for the aid.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Given that all of the child's speech will be produced through the computer-based aid, it may be possible to provide intelligent interactive training.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>