Fabio Fassetti¹ and Ilaria Fassetti², ¹University of Calabria, Italy and ²Therapeia, Italy

The paper presents a framework to evaluate the adequateness of a written text with respect to age or in presence of pathologies like deafness. This work aims at providing insights about verbal production level of an individual in order for a therapist to evaluate the adequateness of such level. The verbal production is analyzed by several points of view, categorized in six families: orthography, syntax, lexicon, lemmata, morphology, discourse. The proposed approach extract several features belonging to these categories through ad-hoc algorithms and exploits such features to train a learner able to classify verbal production in levels. This study is conducted in conjunction with a speech rehabilitation center. The technique is precisely designed for Italian language, however the methodology is more widely applicable. The proposed technique has a twofold aim. Other than the main goal of providing the therapist with an evaluation of the provided essay, the framework could spread lights on relationship between capabilities and ages. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform these evaluations through an automatic system.

Verbal production, Feature Extraction, Deep Learning