PSDD : Prolog-based System for Dyslexia Diagnosis

Abstract

Dyslexia is a learning disability that can hinder a person's ability to read, write, spell, and sometimes
speak. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in children and persists throughout life. The
severity of dyslexia can vary from mild to severe. The sooner dyslexia is treated, the more favorable the
outcome. This paper proposes a prolog based system for dyslexia diagnosis PSDD. PSDD is not only
able to determine the severity degree of this disability but it is also able to propose a treatment plan with
different steps that need to be taken by both teachers and parents. Through their feedback, PSDD is able
to adapt its knowledge in order to give more enhanced treatment plans.

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PSDD : Prolog-based System for Dyslexia Diagnosis
Dr. Adnan G. Abuarafah
1
, Dr. Osama khozium
2
*
(Corresponding Author is Marked with a *, Presenter Author is Underlined)
1
Faculty of computer and information systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makah, SA,
agabuarafa@uqu.edu.sa
2
Faculty of computer and information systems, Umm Al-Qura University, Makah, SA,
osama@khozium.com
Abstract
Dyslexia is a learning disability that can hinder a person's ability to read, write, spell, and sometimes
speak. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in children and persists throughout life. The
severity of dyslexia can vary from mild to severe. The sooner dyslexia is treated, the more favorable the
outcome. This paper proposes a prolog based system for dyslexia diagnosis PSDD. PSDD is not only
able to determine the severity degree of this disability but it is also able to propose a treatment plan with
different steps that need to be taken by both teachers and parents. Through their feedback, PSDD is able
to adapt its knowledge in order to give more enhanced treatment plans.
Keywords: Dyslexia; logic programming; diagnosis; user requirements.
1. Introduction
Dyslexia is not a disease. It is a condition in which a person's brain learns in a different way
from that of other people. The condition has nothing to do with a person's intelligence.
Dyslexia is affecting up to 17% of the population [1] [2] [3] [4] [8]. Those learning disorders
are usually related to the use of language and reading. Learning disorders occur in people of all
ages, races, and income levels. Children have this problem often struggle to acquire word
reading and/or spelling skills and knowledge despite appropriate intervention.
Figure 1
shows
that people with dyslexia tend to confuse certain letters and have difficulty spelling.
The British Psychological Society’s Division of Education and Child Psychology drew
together widespread research showing that dyslexia has multiple causes and the appropriate
intervention consists of frequently delivered and highly structured phonic learning, word
reading and spelling skills programs. Their definition of dyslexia is as follows: “Dyslexia is
evident when accurate and fluent word reading and/or spelling develops very incompletely or
with great difficulty. This focuses on literacy learning at ‘word level’ and implies the problem
is severe and persistent, despite appropriate learning opportunities.” [1]

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Figure
1
.
A Sign of Dyslexia
An independent report, dated June, 2009, from Sir Jim Rose to the Secretary of State for
Children, Schools and Families refers to dyslexia as “Dyslexia is a learning difficulty that
primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling.” [2]
Dyslexia can cause frustration and negative feelings about competencies for some children and
in turn this might cause behavior problems. History gives many examples of great people who
have overcome dyslexia to achieve enormous success– Albert Einstein being probably the most
famous. However, Dyslexia is worrying for both parents and educators [1] [7] [9] [10].
Many teachers lack knowledge of the symptoms of dyslexia and also the resources needed to
diagnose the condition. While teachers continue to carry out tremendous work in schools, they
are however, under extreme pressure, which does mean some dyslexic children go unnoticed.
Children therefore suffer because they do not get diagnosed early enough. In addition, current
tools to diagnose dyslexia can be very expensive and many schools are unable to purchase
them due to budget constraints.
The opportunities for developing an intelligent system for teachers and parents are extremely
valuable. An intelligent diagnostic tool can help teachers and parents identify the symptoms
that are commonly displayed in dyslexic children. This expert system could allow primary
school teachers to confirm that a child may need further investigation by the teachers

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themselves, the parents or by the educational child psychologist. Moreover, the system will be
designed to propose a treatment plan to cure or solve the problem and symptoms of dyslexia.
This paper proposes a prolog-based system for dyslexia diagnosis (PSDD) which is intended to
work as a tool that is easy to use and is not expensive. As stated above, early detection is the
key to helping a dyslexic child so PSDD targets both parents and teachers who are closely
working to dyslexic children. PSDD will help teachers to know what type and degree of
severity of their dyslexic children. Also, it will help parents to monitor the performance and
progress of dyslexic children as well as his current emotional/ physical states. In addition
PSDD will support both of them with recommendations to cure dyslexics, raise their level and
awareness in dealing with this disorder.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section provides overview of dyslexia as
well as the prolog language for developing expert systems. Section three describes the main
architecture of the proposed system (PSDD). Section four concludes the research.
2. Theoretical Background
2.1. Dyslexia
Children with dyslexia have difficulty in learning to read despite traditional instruction, at least
average intelligence, and an adequate opportunity to learn. It is caused by impairment in the
brain's ability to translate images received from the eyes or ears into understandable language.
The child can become frustrated by the difficulty in learning to read, and other problems can
appear that disguise dyslexia. The child may show signs of depression and low self-esteem.
Dyslexia may affect several different functions. Visual dyslexia is characterized by number and
letter reversals and the inability to write symbols in the correct sequence. Auditory dyslexia
involves difficulty with sounds of letters or groups of letters. The sounds are perceived as
jumbled or not heard correctly. Some children with dyslexia may suffer from visual stress.
Visual stress is the experience of unpleasant visual symptoms when reading. Symptoms
include illusions of shape, movement and color in the text, distortion of the print, loss of print
clarity, and general visual irritation.
Figure 2
shows simulation of one symptom of visual stress.
The causes of dyslexia fall into two broad categories [1] [7].
Neurological
or genetic inheritance,
forms of damage to the brain during or post birth.
Environmental
or lack of exposure to reading,
reduced motivation and self-esteem in relation to reading and spelling, unvaried methods of
teaching word reading and spelling, for example total use of synthetic phonics approaches will

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disadvantage children who are more successful at being able to recognize whole words but
struggle to split words into sound patterns or build sounds into words. The problem for the
investigator trying to pinpoint a cause is that factors within these two broad categories
interrelate and neurological problems can cause environmental ones and vice versa.
Figure
2
.
Simulation of one Symptom of Visual Stress
Dyslexia is a difficult disorder to diagnose. If one were to take a group of dyslexic and a group
of non-dyslexic adults, statistically significant differences between these groups in reading,
writing and spelling would almost certainly be found. But if one took an individual adult with
dyslexia, he or she may have literacy skills in the average range (although probably below that
which might be reasonably expected from their intelligence and education), while an individual
adult who does not have dyslexia may have below average literacy skills.
There are many factors the psychologist or other health professional reviews to diagnose the
disability. The testing determines the child's functional reading level and compares it to reading
potential, which is evaluated by an intelligence test. The tests determine whether a child learns
better by hearing information (auditory), looking at information (visual), or doing something
(kinesthetic). They also assess whether a child performs better when allowed to give
information (output), by saying something (oral), or by doing something with their hands
(tactile-kinesthetic). The tests also evaluate how all of these sensory systems (modalities) work
in conjunction with each other.

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2.2. Usage of Prolog in the Development of Expert Systems
Prolog as a logic programming language provides many possibilities to realize a task [12] [13].
It is a general purpose language often associated with artificial intelligence and computational
linguistics. It has a purely logical subset, called "pure Prolog", as well as a number of extra-
logical features. Programs written in PROLOG have behavior similar to rule-based systems
written in LISP. PROLOG, however, did not immediately become a language of choice for AI
programmers. In the early 1980s it was given impetus with the announcement by the Japanese
that they would use a logic programming language for the Fifth Generation Computing
Systems (FGCS) Project. A variety of logic-based programming languages have since arisen,
and the term prolog has become generic.
Iterative algorithms can be implemented by means of recursive predicates. Prolog systems
typically implement a well-known optimization technique called tail call optimization (TCO)
for deterministic predicates exhibiting tail recursion or, more generally, tail calls: A clause's
stack frame is discarded before performing a call in a tail position. Therefore, deterministic
tail-recursive predicates are executed with constant stack space, like loops in other languages.
Logic programming provides many possibilities to implement a task. Solutions can be realized
by applying a variety of different design strategies and programming techniques. Using
constrained-based modeling (CBM) the solution space for a given programming task can be
covered. The (CBM) approach has been showing great promise as a diagnostic approach which
focuses on static cognitive states rather than problem solving processes.
The CBM approach is proposed to model general principles of a domain as a set of constraints.
A constraint is represented as an ordered air consisting of a relevance part and a satisfaction
part. Where the relevance part represents circumstances under which the constraint applies, and
the satisfaction part represents a condition that requires to be met for the constraint to be
satisfied. A constraint is used to describe a fact, a principle or a condition which must hold for
every solution. For example
Figure 3
shows a principle that can be formulated as constraint.
Figure
3
.
An Example of a Constraint 1

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Constraints are not only used to limit facts, principles or conditions of a domain, they can also
be used to specify the requirements of a task or to handle solution variations. Using the
relevance part, constraints can be tailored according to an ideal solution, which represents the
requirements of the given task. Ideal solutions enable to check whether the problem is
answered correctly, looking at the semantics. Additional requirement, which have to be
satisfied in that specific situation, can be specified in the satisfaction part.
Figure 4
shows an
example that specifies the constraints 2 to examine the operator required in the task.
Figure
4
.
An Example of a Constraint 2
If a constraint is violated, it indicates that the solution does not hold principles of a domain or it
does not meet the requirements of the given task.
3. PSDD
Figure 5
summarizes the main PSDD function. PSDD acquires knowledge about dyslexic
children, analyzes the acquired knowledge through its knowledge base and generates the
degree of severity as well as a treatment plan to be used by both parents and educators. After
applying the plan for the recommended period, parents and educators will be able to feedback
PSDD with their remarks about the performance of the dyslexic children in order to get
advanced plans to continue towards curing.
Figure
5
.
PSDD Schematic Diagram

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3.1. Architecture
The architecture of the proposed system consists of four main components. Figure 6 shows the
main architecture of the proposed system and data flow. PSDD includes mainly two modules:
knowledge base module and report generator module.
Figure 6 The Main
Architecture
of PSDD
3.2. Knowledge Acquisition
PSDD acquires knowledge from three sources:
• Test and state of the dyslexic to define the initial diagnosis;
• Report of the case by the educators through PSDD;
• Report of the case by the parents through PSDD.
Tests are designed to catch different aspects regarding different disabilities; they contain:
• Questions about vision, reading and spelling;
• Questions about behavior, health, development and personality spelling;
• Questions about disorientation;
• Questions about writing and motor skills;
• Questions about math and time management;
PSDD
Educators
Parents
KB
Module
Report
Module
Dyslexic
profile
Progressing Report
Progressing Report
Feed back
Feed back

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• Questions about memory and cognition.
Figure 7
shows an example in Arabic language of a state test that will be provided to PSDD.
Figure
7
.
PSDD Schematic Diagram
3.3. PSDD Inference
The main rule in PSDD is to calculate the result of each aspect as an individual by itself and
evaluate its percentage , every aspects has two counters so if the answer is yes it adds 1 to the x
counter and if maybe then it will add 1 to the s counter. See
Figure 8
.
Examples of the facts used by PSDD are as follows:
• Fact1: “Complains of dizziness, headaches or stomach ache while reading”.
• Fact2: “Confused by letters, numbers, words, sequences, or verbal explanations”.

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Figure
8
.
Some Calculations of the Results using CBM in Prolog
After calculating each aspect alone, the average of all aspects will be given in percentage as
shown in
Figure 8
.
PSDD gives some explanations and definitions for the aforementioned aspects to facilitate and
explain the meaning for the nonprofessional persons.
Figure 9
explains what it means by
disorientation and the symptom for this disorder.
Figure
9
.
Disorientation Explanation by PSDD
Recommendations to the educators and parents are provided to facilitate the treatment of the
dyslexics. See Figure 5. These recommendations are changed due to the current evaluation of
the case and the progressing rate.
Normally PSDD will modify the recommendations each report goes along with the progressing
rate of the case. PSDD has the ability to add new recommendations or modify the old one if
necessary.

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Figure
10
.
Recommendations to Educators and Parents by PSDD
3.4. PSDD Output
Two kinds of output are generated by PSDD
• Progressing report provided by the PSDD each period of time, this period will be
defined by the educators due to the progressing rate, normally this period around two to
three months;
• The progressing report will include some recommendations to the educators and the
parents to guide them through the treatment of the case.
4. Discussion and Conclusion
This paper discusses PSDD which diagnoses dyslexia cases in a simple way. PSDD generates
periodic reports which reflect the progress of the case according to the recommendations
provided to the educators and the parents. These recommendations will help them to support
the dyslexics to overcome this disorder.
As for future work we would like to include a sound recorder to read test questions, and to
modify the fonts so it can be readable by dyslexic people, and try to include oral tests in it,
such as written text and the person enters the answers as the meaning of the text.

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