Skip to content

Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a scourge for libraries. We love to get everyone reading and writing. Dyslexia gets in the way.
So I was thrilled to see that Oxford University announced on October 1, 2008 that the gene for dyslexia has been identified, offering great hope for early interventions that could head off the frustrations and challenges facing those with the condition when learning to read and write. The scientists stressed that dyslexia and IQ are not connected, as further evidenced by the success of people who have learned to compensate for the learning disability. The vice president of the British Dyslexia Association noted commented that, “The finding of a gene associated with reading ability in the general population as well as in dyslexia is in line with our observation that there are degrees of dyslexia from mild to severe. It also implies that there are other genes or environmental experiences which must be involved in determining reading ability.”
Here is the article.
Stephen

  • Pro plugin deactivated or invalid

Posted on: October 2, 2008, 11:25 pm Category: Uncategorized

By: stephen

rev="post-1924" 2 comments

2 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Ghotit said
    on October 8, 2008 5:43 pm

    In today’s school and business environments, the most common means of communication is reading and writing. People that don’t master those communication methods are usually left behind.
    5-17% of the population suffers from dyslexia, a neurological problem that affects those peoples’ ability to write and read freely. In addition, approximately 1.5 billion people are left behind due to the fact that English is their second language.
    The common number one writing assistive technology, the standard spellchecker, is not effective for people with dyslexia and people that use English as their second language. This failure is due to two structural limitations of all spellcheckers:
    1. The fact that a spelled word needs to be very, very close to the target word in order to get corrected spelling
    2. The fact that the text is checked word by word, disregarding any contextual considerations
    From a technical perspective, most of the spellcheckers use a very limited editing distance, which is defined as the number of operations required to transform one word into another. For example, the words ‘happy’ and ‘hapy’ have an editing distance of 1 (one missing letter) and will, therefore be attuned successfully, but the words “happy” and “apy” have an editing distance of 2 and therefore will not be treated successfully. In addition, standard spellcheckers will regard the sentence “I will be happy to meat you at 8 o’clock” as a legitimate expression, disregarding the intention of the writer, which is “I will be happy to meet you at 8 o’clock. The word “meat” will not appear as a misspelled word since it is found in the dictionary.
    For many years Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers developed advanced models in order to analyze spelling from a contextual wording perspective, but unfortunately these models were not able to hold water in the real world.
    Today a company named Ghotit comes and changes it all. Ghotit’s mission is to move people with writing and reading problems towards the main stream, the general population that do not have any problems with reading and writing. Ghotit’s solution is an online context sensitive spellchecker which copes effectively with spelling mistakes that regular spellcheckers can’t cope with, and a capability to identify misused words and offer the appropriate corrections based on a contextual analysis of the sentence.
    In order to further assist the user, Ghotit offers both a Text to Speech service, which enables the user to request his text to be read out aloud, and online definitions of each word, so that the user can easily select the correct candidate word.
    Ghotit was founded by Ofer Chermesh, a lifelong dyslectic and entrepreneur who for years had envisioned in his mind the exact assistive technology solution that would address his writing and reading hardships; and by his friend Dr. Robert Iakobashvili a high performance computing expert that undertook the challenge of translating Ofer’s dream into a reality.
    Ghotit web site launched February 2008 after more than a year of research and development. Current testing of a corpus of dyslectic English demonstrated 90% correction success for Ghotit. This is in comparison to academic research reports that state that the best spell checkers success rate is under 35% (e.g. a recent Ph.D. study http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/research/recentphds/pedler.pdf).
    Ghotit plans in the near future to integrate Ghotit to different word and email editors such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs and to improve its context spell checker by adding grammar corrections and text enrichment capabilities. Each user will manage a personalized dictionary that can be accessed online from any computing device. Further plans include self-optimizing algorithms that optimize the context spellchecker algorithms based on specific user behavioral patterns.
    Ghotit plans to contribute its error-collected corpus to the academia for research purposes.
    For a review of Ghotit please go to SpeEdChange.
    About Ghotit LTD:
    Incorporated 2008
    http://www.ghotit.com; Web site launched February 2008
    Founders:
    Ofer Chermesh CEO
    Dr. Robert Iakobashvili CTO & VP R&D

  2. non of ur bibniss said
    on November 8, 2008 8:47 am

    thye should not know that they r dyslixi becouce if they know thaqt they r thay will just not try to read or write