Extending VITHEA in order to improve children’s linguistic skills

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often comprises difficulties in the acquisition of communication and language skills. Several researchers and companies have developed software to help individuals with ASD developing those skills; however, there is a lack of applications in Portuguese that are tailored to the individual needs of each child. In this context, we present VITHEA-Kids, a platform where caregivers can create exercises and customize the interaction between each child and the platform. We also developed a module for the automatic generation of multiple choice exercises, meant to be integrated in VITHEA-Kids. We evaluated this work with caregivers (which provided promising indicators), with a child (ongoing upon thesis delivery) and we also evaluated the generation of incorrect answers in multiple choice exercises (achieving acceptance rates between 61.11% and 92.22 %).