Building a phonics engine for automated text guidance

This paper describes the results of work done to develop an automated guidance system for readers with dyslexia and related literacy difficulties. The system was developed to address the specific needs of dyslexic readers and teachers providing support to them in the analysis of words into their phonic components. This includes division into syllables both in spoken and written form, mapping of graphemes to phonemes and highlighting of common spelling patterns. Despite a large volume of NLP resources being available, we could identify no system that would provide this level of analysis. Such system is necessary to advance the field of computer-assisted literacy support. For instance, by developing open-world games not limited to pre-set lists of words or a reader application that can highlight phonic features of any word. In order to provide such guidance we designed an annotated dictionary, list of phonic features with associated look up routines and dictionary annotation algorithms. The resulting phonics engine was then used to power a reader application and a phonic games system developed as part of iLearnRW. We make recommendations for further directions in research and development. The research and development described in this paper was conducted as part of the EU FP7 ICT project iLearnRW - Integrated Intelligent Learning Environment for Reading and Writing (318803).