Intelligent Text Processing to Help Readers with Autism

Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which has a life-long impact on the lives of people diagnosed with the condition. In many cases, people with ASD are unable to derive the gist or meaning of written documents due to their inability to process complex sentences, understand non-literal text, and understand uncommon and technical terms. This paper presents FIRST, an innovative project which developed language technology (LT) to make documents more accessible to people with ASD. The project has produced a powerful editor which enables carers of people with ASD to prepare texts suitable for this population. Assessment of the texts generated using the editor showed that they are not less readable than those generated more slowly as a result of onerous unaided conversion and were significantly more readable than the originals. Evaluation of the tool shows that it can have a positive impact on the lives of people with ASD.

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