Open Book: a tool for helping ASD users’ semantic comprehension

Persons affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) present impairments in social interaction. A significant percentile of them have inadequate reading comprehension skills. In the ongoing FIRST project we build a multilingual tool called Open Book that helps the ASD people to better understand the texts. The tool applies a series of automatic transformations to user documents to identify and remove the reading obstacles to comprehension. We focus on three semantic components: an Image component that retrieves images for the concepts in the text, an idiom detection component and a topic model component. Moreover, we present the personalization component that adapts the system output to user preferences.