Paper Readgin #22 - Vocabulary Navigation Made Easier

Comments:

Reference:
Vocabulary Navigation Made Easier
Sonya Nikolova, Xiaojuan Ma, Marilyn Tremaine, Perry Cook
IUI '10

Summary:
There are many reasons to search for words in an electronic dictionary, but it is not always easy to find the word that you're looking for.  This is especially true for people with aphasia, a cognitive disorder that results in afflicted persons being able to remember the correct words to express their thoughts.  The visual vocabulary for aphasia (or ViVA) attempts to improve word finding by using word associasion measures, human judgements of evocation, vocabulary usage statistics, and a large-scale lexical database.  It works through associations of words.  For example, if someone needed to find the word milk, they would choose the kitchen category, then go through fridge, dairy, and finally arrive at milk.

In testing ViVA against a typical LG vocabulary, where there are no associations between words, the authors found that ViVA performed significantly better in the total number of click needed to select the correct word.  They also found that when participants did not know the association of a certain word, they were albe to find it through looking for other words in a similar category (i.e. using tea as a way to find milk).  However, the authors note that as their test subjects were fluent in English, they must rate this preliminary evaluation as inconclusive.

Discussion:
This has a real potential to be an excellent tool to assisting individuals with weak skills in any given language.  I typically use a dictionary when I want to double check the spelling of a word, but in the case of a foreign language where there is no readily available english-to-foreign resource this system would be able to bridge the gap nicely.  That doesn't make this a perfect system, however.  From what I understand, this provides little to no grammar context, nor does it teach pronunciation.  Still, in this case the good outweighs the bad.