Abstract
Utterance is very important for us to communicate with others. However, many people have speech handicaps and can’t produce utterance smoothly. They mainly rely on writing and sign language for communication. But they are not easy skills for them to master. In order to help them, we developed a new utterance support system which can function through an information terminal. We made predictions which includes two additional functions of fixed phrase dictionary and the class 2-gram – one of the statistical approaches for processing natural language. Fixed phrase dictionary includes phrases often used in our daily life conversations and class 2-gram uses co-occurrence frequencies of parts of speech in Japanese. There are two purposes for us to use class 2-gram, one is to generate next candidates and the other is to change frequency. We concluded two evaluation experiments. The results show that our system needs less numbers of inputs in helping with written utterance production and using our prototype permits us to input more characters in one minute than using iPhone IME. Hereafter, we intend to create more effective dictionaries and develop new GUI to make our system more effective and faster.
