UPPSALA – Universal Pictographic Pictorial Sentence Annotation for Language Acquisition

In this paper, we introduce a new sentence annotation, which relies on visual elements to convey the semantic interpretation. This makes it perfectly suited for the use in language learning environments and other multilingual applications. By building upon the rich experience in the related field of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), we organize the annotation as a grid of tiles with pictograms for concepts and emoji for roles. As first use case we developed a framework for Japanese based on a flexible, distributed architecture using augmented browsing and several dedicated high-performance servers.