Natural language processing for improving hearing-impaired student reading skills

Nowadays, joint efforts of institutions and government have allowed creating a legal framework to protect the rights of people with disabilities, one of which is the access to information. People with hearing impairment have difficulties in developing reading skills. They present a reduced lexicon and a lack of knowledge of syntactic structures. With the support of technology, support applications have been developed to help different aspects of communication for the hearing impaired, for example, sign language dictionaries and exercises to identify words, among others, used at different academic levels. With the use of natural language processing is intended to create new alternatives targeting specific needs of the user. Our proposal will focus on the analysis of text, using images and additional information with respect to the context. This will allow users visualize the information in a way that can gradually increase the breadth of vocabulary and improve reading comprehension. The study will focus on deaf students at the college level using textbooks in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences as a knowledge base.