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<Paper uid="W97-0510">
  <Title>I A software for language education and rehabilitation of autistic-like children</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="59" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We describe here the EREL system, a therapeutic software devoted to the Education, Rehabilitation and Evaluation of Language devoted to children suffering from language (and then communication) disorders, and especially devoted to &amp;quot;autistic-like&amp;quot; children. In addition to their difficulties to express themselves verbally, many of these children suffer also from cognitive and/or motor disorders which make graphic or written expression difficult, and often make these persons keep socially apart (Ornitz, 1974) (Manrer and Damasio, 1982). But, given a motivating context, an individualised surrounding environment and materials, some of these children may be able to exteriorise capacities which had hitherto remained mute.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For more than ten years, a large amount of research has been carried out in the field of communication rehabilitation for handicapped persons, and technical aids known as &amp;quot;communication aids&amp;quot; have now been developed with some success. They can use &amp;quot;communication bords containing words (whose quantity, i.e. vocabulary, depends on the capacities of the user), graphic representations (pictures and photos, hierarchies of pictures, e.g. TEACCH program widely used in USA), written communication, synthetic voices. They aim to compensate the loss of communication for people without the use of speech.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The use of computers as an intermediary has been seen as a natural extension of the use of classical communication aids; it may enable to bypass the different handicaps temporarily at least, and to compensate for the problems with language and motricity (Garoux et al. , 1989) (Howlin, 1989).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The EREL system, described here, is an application of research in the domain of natural language processing and especially of the development of natural language interfaces, and has been designed in a collaboration with medical staffs (doctors, psychologists, etc.) specialised in the treatment of children suffering from developmental disorders (such as typical and atypical autism, or childhood psychosis) (Godbert, 1996). The system provides a set of educational play activities illustrated through multimedia technology and designed to stimulate and help users to employ common language to express themselves within a specific context.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The development of EREL is based on the French ILLICO system, a generator for various natural language processing systems which provides a set of language processing tools using computational linguistic techniques making it possible to produce text in a &amp;quot;guided mode&amp;quot; (Pasero and Sabatier, 1994) (Pasero  and Sabatier, 1997). We will show that this mode is of great relevance to communication aids for the disabled.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> In part 2, we describe the ILLICO system. In part 3, we mention the state of the art in the domain of communication aids for autistic children, and we show why ILLICO is relevant to the development of software devoted to the rehabilitation of persons suffering from language disorders. The functionality of EREL is described in part 4. Part 5 goes into all the details of an activity proposed by the software, and describes some specific elements of NLP required for its development.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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