The objective of the project is to design a computer system aimed at improving the writing skills of the hearing impaired whose writing ability lags behind that of their hearing counterparts. The benefit of such a system hinges on the system's ability to detect errors and to offer beneficial corrective advice. The work will draw on work in second language acquistion and a linguistic comparison of American Sign Language and English as well as analysis of writing samples from hearing impaired individuals, in order to develop a taxonomy of expected errors. The expected errors will be added as annotated "mal-rules" to a grammar of English. Upon parsing a sentence containing one of the identified errors, the system will use the annotations to generate a corrective response. The user may then be queried in order to acquire information necessary to correct the user's input sentence. Finally, a correct sentence will be generated. In addition to the potential benefit to the hearing impaired population, this work will lead toward a truly intelligent computer aided instruction system which will require advances in current natural language processing capabilities. In particualr, advances will be made in dealing will ill-formed input as well as in identifying sufficient representations for sencence generation.
