How was School Today...? in the Wild

增强和替代性交流（AAC）可以为因残疾（如脑瘫）而很少或没有语言的儿童提供计算机化的语音输出。基于计算机的语音生成AAC设备提供对预存单词、短语和句子的访问，非常适合于传达需求和愿望（例如我渴了）。但是，它们并不能很好地支持更复杂的交互，如会话叙事（猜猜我今天发生了什么）和社交对话（eidogg.，pub chats about football）。这些互动不仅对建立词汇和一般语言习得至关重要，而且也是建立和维持友谊和其他社会关系的重要组成部分。事实上，社交孤立是沟通障碍者生活质量的主要问题。我们的目标是开发AAC工具，支持讲故事和社交对话。我们将在可行性研究中建立我们的工作，在该研究中，我们构建了一个概念验证系统，用于帮助有沟通障碍的儿童构建和讲述他们在学校的一天。我们使用传感器来跟踪孩子们的位置，活动和互动。这些数据被用于使用自然语言生成数据到文本系统来生成故事草稿。我们还建立了一些工具，让孩子们可以编辑和互动地讲述故事。对两名残疾儿童的评估表明，该系统使他们能够体验更自然的对话。该项目将解决可行性研究中提出的几个问题：该系统需要能够支持具有各种能力和缺陷的儿童;需要根据学校环境和课程进行调整;需要对教师和学生具有吸引力。它还需要能够在野外运行，而不需要研究团队的持续技术支持。本提案旨在调查这些问题，以创建一个改进的原型系统，我们将试用五个月，而不是可行性项目中的一周。就其性质而言，这项工作必须与儿童及其学校密切合作进行;我们需要融入环境，以充分调查实施和使用这种系统的现实情况。我们将与工作人员，家长和孩子们一起工作，以了解他们的观点，多样性对儿童的影响，以及在学校环境中技术支持的实用性。

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) can provide access to computerised speech output for children who have little or no speech due to disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Computer based speech generating AAC devices which provide access to prestored words, phrases and sentences are well suited to communicate needs and wants (such as I am thirsty). However, they do not well support more complex interactions such as conversational narrative (guess what happened to me today) and social dialogue (e.g., pub chats about football). Not only are these interactions essential for building vocabulary and general language acquisition; they form an essential part of the process of making and sustaining friendships and other social relationships. Indeed, social isolation is a major quality-of-life issue amongst people with communication impairment.Our goal is to develop AAC tools that support story-telling and social dialogue. We will be building on our work in a feasibility study in which we constructed a proof-of-concept system for helping children with communication disabilities to construct and tell stories about their day at school. We used sensors to track the children's location, activities, and interactions. This data was used to generate a draft story using a natural language generation data-to-text system. We also built tools which allowed the children to edit and interactively narrate the stories. Evaluation with two disabled children showed that the system allowed them to experience more natural conversation. This project will address several issues raised in the feasibility study: the system needs to be able to support children with very diverse capabilities and impairments; it needs to be tailored to fit into the school environment and curriculum; and it needs to be attractive to teachers as well as students. It also needs to be able to run in the wild without the need for the constant technical support from the research team.This proposal seeks to investigate these issues in order to create an improved prototype system which we will trial for five months, not just one week as in the feasibility project. By its nature this work must be carried out in close collaboration with the children and their school; we need to embed ourselves in the environment in order to fully investigate the reality of implementing and using such a system. We will work with staff, parents and children to understand their perspectives, the impact of diversity in the children, and the practicalities of technical support in a school environment.