Extending a Dutch Text-to-Pictograph Converter to English and Spanish

We describe how a Dutch Text-to-Pictograph translation system, designed to augment written text for people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD), was adapted in order to be usable for English and Spanish. The original system has a language-independent design. As far as the textual part is concerned, it is adaptable to all natural languages for which interlingual WordNet [1] links, lemmatizers and part-of-speech taggers are available. As far as the pictographic part is concerned, it can be modified for various pictographic languages. The evaluations show that our results are in line with the performance of the original Dutch system. Text-to-Pictograph translation has a wide application potential in the domain of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). The system will be released as an open source product.