Children with complex communication needs who use voice output communication aids seldom engage in extended conversation. The "How was School today. . . ?" system has been designed to enable such children to talk about their school day. The system uses data-to-text technology to generate narratives from sensor data. Observations, interviews and prototyping were used to ensure that stakeholders were involved in the design of the system. Evaluations with three children showed that the prototype system, which automatically generates utterances, has the potential to support disabled individuals to participate better in interactive conversation. Analysis of a conversational transcript and observations indicate that the children were able to access relevant conversation and had more control in the conversation in comparison to their usual interactions where control lay mainly with the speaking partner. Further research to develop an improved, more rugged system that supports users with different levels of language ability is now underway.

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This paper describes a Natural Language Generation system (NLG), How was School Today? that automatically creates a personal narrative from sensor data and other media (photos and audio). It can be used by children with complex communication needs in schools to support interactive narrative about personal experiences. The robustness of story generation to missing data was identified as a key area for improvement in a feasibility study of the system at a fi special needs school. This paper therefore suggests three possible methods for generating stories from unstructured data: clustering by voice recording, by location, or by time. Clustering based on voice recordings resulted in stories that were perceived as most easy to read, and to make most sense, by parents in a quantitative evaluation. This method was implemented in the live system, which was developed and evaluated iteratively at a second special needs school with children with diff t usage profi Open challenges and possibilities for nlg in augmented and alternative communication are also discussed.

The interactive STANDUP software was developed to provide children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) with a “language playground.” The software provides appropriate functionality for users with physical, speech, and language impairments to generate and tell novel punning riddles at different levels of complexity. STANDUP was evaluated with nine children with cerebral palsy during an eight-week study. Results show that the participants were able to generate and tell novel jokes with minimal or no support. The use of STANDUP impacted favorably on general AAC use. The study results also suggested that STANDUP could potentially have a positive effect on social and pragmatic skills. Further research to investigate the impact of STANDUP on communication skills is proposed. Suggestions for future software development include providing users with opportunities to complete jokes and to integrate online dictionaries when new vocabulary is encountered.

Background: Patients with intellectual disabilities have poorer oral hygiene than the general population. These oral health problems may stem from the anxiety that these patients experience on visiting the dentist. Dental staff may also have difficulty in ensuring their patients understand the treatments they receive at the dentist. Making dentists aware of their communication strategy may combat some of the barriers that some patients with complex communication needs experience in the dental setting. The aim of this study was to report a newly applied training technique to the dental setting to examine dentist/patient communication.Materials and Methods: A dentist participated in Video Interaction Guidance to encourage more attuned interactions with their patients. The dentist was presented with short segments of video footage taken during an appointment with two patients with intellectual disabilities and communication difficulties. Having observed their interactions, the dentist was asked to reflect on their communication strategies with the assistance of a trained VIG specialist.Results: The dentist successfully identified several verbal and non-verbal communication strategies they believed to be effective in reducing patient anxiety and relinquishing control to the patient.Where these strategies were omitted not used, the dentist recognised their strategy and gave positive reflections that may improve future interactions with their patients.Discussion: The VIG session was beneficial in this exploratory investigation because the dentist could identify when their interactions were most effective. Awareness of their non-verbal and verbal communication strategies and the need to adopt these behaviours frequently, were identified as key to improving outcomes for their patients. 3 IntroductionPatient compliance in health interventions can be encouraged if the clinician can communicate effectively with their patients (Freeman & Humphries, 2006). This can provide life-long benefits for patients, leading to increased health and wellbeing. Where communication falters, patients may have greater difficulty accepting their treatments and become disengaged from the decision making process (Hacking, Scott, Wallace, Shepherd & Belkora, 2013). This can lead patients to feel more uncertain and anxious about the outcome of their treatments, particularly with complex clinical procedures where communication may be more challenging. Dougall and Fiske (2008) suggest that the verbal and non-verbal cues that are used during communication do not occur equally. For example, 'words' are thought to take up 7% of our communication with others, whilst a persons' tone of voice and non-verbal cues (i.e. facial expressions and body language) contribute 33% and 60%, respectively. To ensure that a message has been understood, the communicator should ask the individual receiving the message whether they understand what is being communicated and reflect on their communication strategy. Where verbal and non-verbal signals are incongruent...