# PicTalky: Augmentative and Alternative Communication Software for Language Developmental Disabilities

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12941/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08210/) (2020)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Denoising Criterion for Variational Auto-Encoding Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06406/) (2015)
- [Naver at ActivityNet Challenge 2019 -- Task B Active Speaker Detection (AVA)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.10555/) (2019)
- [A Neural Grammatical Error Correction System Built On Better Pre-training and Sequential Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01256/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Can Vision Language Models Understand Mimed Actions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21586/) (2025)
- [Enhancing AAC Software for Dysarthric Speakers in e-Health Settings: An Evaluation Using TORGO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00980/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is a practical means of communication for people with language disabilities. In this study, we propose PicTalky, which is an AI-based AAC system that helps children with language developmental disabilities to improve their communication skills and language comprehension abilities. PicTalky can process both text and pictograms more accurately by connecting a series of neural-based NLP modules. Moreover, we perform quantitative and qualitative analyses on the essential features of PicTalky. It is expected that those suffering from language problems will be able to express their intentions or desires more easily and improve their quality of life by using this service. We have made the models freely available alongside a demonstration of the Web interface. Furthermore, we implemented robotics AAC for the first time by applying PicTalky to the NAO robot.