A semantic grammar for beginning communicators

Beginning communicators are children faced with to the task of language learning. Young, typically developing children are early speakers before the age of 2 years, the initial period of communication and language development. When this development is not happening because of disabilities or delays, it is possible to use computer-aided tools in order to help people to palliate or overcome such limitations, at least partially. For example, an Augmentative and Alternative Communication system must manage a vocabulary made up of several hundred concepts, usually without knowledge of the language at a semantic and pragmatic level. Such knowledge would make possible, for example, the implementation of new strategies for word prediction based on meaning, a very precise natural language generation or semantic parsing of the messages so that it would not allow the composition of meaningless messages. We present Simple Upper Ontology, SUpO, a semantic grammar which is made up of detailed knowledge of facts of the everyday life of simple words. In order to build SUpO we developed a procedure designed to give syntactic detail to part of FrameNet, a well-known ontology which encodes knowledge about usages of language at the semantic level. The result of this procedure is a multilingual semantic grammar which has been implemented by using Grammatical Framework. Finally, we propose some examples of tools where the use of SUpO would be suitable.