Exploiting Lexical Resources for Therapeutic Purposes: the Case of WordNet and STaRS.sys.

In this paper, we present an on-going project aiming at extending the Word-Net lexical database by encoding common sense featural knowledge elicited from language speakers. Such extension of WordNet is required in the framework of the STaRS.sys project, which has the goal of building tools for supporting the speech therapist during the preparation of exercises to be submitted to aphasic patients for rehabilitation purposes. We review some preliminary results and illustrate what extensions of the existing WordNet model are needed to accommodate for the encoding of commonsense (featural) knowledge.