About
The demo
Our demos showcase the Text2Picto and Picto2Text translation technologies, which were developed to improve the accessibility of the Internet for people with an intellectual disability. The Dutch translation technologies are used on the safe web environment WAI-NOT.
The original Text2Picto web demo (i.e., the web demo for Dutch without advanced natural language processing solutions) was implemented by Vincent Vandeghinste within the "Picto" framework (2012-2014), a project financed by the Steunfonds Marguerite-Marie Delacroix to enhance communication for people with reading disabilities. The Cornetto database was used to link pictographs to words, with the help of Ineke Schuurman.
The English and Spanish Text2Picto and Picto2Text web demos were implemented by Leen Sevens and Vincent Vandeghinste within the "Able to Include" framework (2014-2017), which sought to improve the living conditions of people with an intellectual disability. The Princeton WordNet and the MCR 3.0 for Spanish databases were used to link pictographs to words.
The current versions of the Dutch Text2Picto and Picto2Text web demos were implemented by Leen Sevens as part of her PhD project "Words Divide, Pictographs Unite" (2015-2018) at KU Leuven under the supervision of Frank Van Eynde and Vincent Vandeghinste. This project was funded by the Agentschap Innoveren & Ondernemen.
The pictograph sets
The Beta system was developed as a visual, communication-supportive system, from the conviction that other pictographic systems were too abstract or too systematic.
The Sclera website and pictographs were designed at Terninck, a day care centre for adults with a cognitive disability. The targeted group made use of a special calendar filled with black and white images, which helped them to give shape to their weekly activities.
The Centre for Computational Linguistics at KU Leuven
Our main objective is to contribute to basic research in formal and computational linguistics, and to the application of this research in natural language processing. The Centre for Computational Linguistics builds on the expertise acquired during the eighties within the framework of various NLP projects. It has been involved in many European and national projects in the fields of machine translation (Eurotra, Siemens-Metal, METIS-I, METIS-II, PaCo-MT, Picto) and other branches of computational linguistics. It is also the coordinator of CLARIN-VL. CLARIN is an ESFRI project.
