Click on bake to get cookies: guiding word-finding with semantic associations

It is challenging to navigate a dictionary consisting of thousands of entries in order to select appropriate words for building communication. This is particularly true for people with lexical access disorders like those present in aphasia. We make vocabulary navigation and word-finding easier by building a vocabulary network where links between words reflect human judgments of semantic relatedness. We report the results from a user study with people with aphasia that evaluated how our system (called ViVA) performs compared to a widely used vocabulary access system in which words are organized hierarchically into common categories and subcategories. The results indicate that word retrieval is significantly better with ViVA, but finding the first word to start a communication is still problematic and requires further investigation.

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