PROPICTO (PRojection du langage Oral vers des unités PICTOgraphiques) is an ANR/SNF 4-year project whose main goal is to develop a line of research on Alternative and Augmented Communication (AAC) by focusing on the automatic transcription of French speech into pictogram sequences for the sake of enhancing communication access. PROPICTO addresses many key research challenges related to Natural Language Processing (NLP), including:

The PROPICTO Project thus tackles many societal needs in the fields of disability (in regards to communicating with people having cognitive impairment) and medicine (that is, interacting with patients who do not speak the same language as the practitioner). It also meets the legal requirements adopted in Switzerland (Federal Act of 2002 on the Elimination of Discrimination against People with Disabilities as well as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), ratified by Switzerland in 2014) and also in France (through the reform initiated by the Law No. 2002-2 and reinforced by the Law No. 2005-102).

Upon the completion of PROPICTO, we will provide methods and corpora that will allow direct speech transcription into open source pictographic units (such as the ARASAAC symbol set) for several target audiences (foreigners and people with cognitive disorders, mainly). Furthermore, we will put into production several prototypes to be implemented for particular needs and contexts (namely, in emergency medical settings or within the framework of specialized institutions).