Frequent Words Improve Readability and Short Words Improve Understandability for People with Dyslexia

Rello, Luz; Baeza-Yates, Ricardo; Dempere-Marco, Laura; Saggion, Horacio

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40498-6_15

Cited by 96 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Similarly, Rello et al [44] demonstrate how text containing longs words were less understandable by people with dyslexia than the same texts when the long words were substituted by shorter synonyms. Minshew and Goldstein [37] present that people with autism spectrum dis orders have difficulty understanding complex sentences.…”

Section: Readability In Target Populationsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Measuring text simplification with the crowd

Lasecki

Rello

Bigham

2015

Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference

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Text can often be complex and difficult to read, especially for peo ple with cognitive impairments or low literacy skills. Text simplifi cation is a process that reduces the complexity of both wording and structure in a sentence, while retaining its meaning. However, this is currently a challenging task for machines, and thus, providing effective on-demand text simplification to those who need it re mains an unsolved problem. Even evaluating the simplicity of text remains a challenging problem for both computers, which cannot understand the meaning of text, and humans, who often struggle to agree on what constitutes a good simplification.This paper focuses on the evaluation of English text simplifica tion using the crowd. We show that leveraging crowds can result in a collective decision that is accurate and converges to a consen sus rating. Our results from 2,500 crowd annotations show that the crowd can effectively rate levels of simplicity. This may allow sim plification systems and system builders to get better feedback about how well content is being simplified, as compared to standard mea sures which classify content into 'simplified' or 'not simplified' categories. Our study provides evidence that the crowd could be used to evaluate English text simplification, as well as to create simplified text in future work.

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Section: Readability In Target Populationsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Measuring text simplification with the crowd

Lasecki

Rello

Bigham

2015

Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference

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“…If we consider that frequent words are also likely to be short, our assumption is that complex words are likely to be, on average, both less frequent and longer than simple ones (Zipf, 1949). This assumption is also related to text readability and it has been tested in an experiment with dyslexic readers concluding that frequent words tend to improve readability while shorter words help text comprehension (Rello et al, 2013).…”

Section: Frequency and Length Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

MAZA at SemEval-2016 Task 11: Detecting Lexical Complexity Using a Decision Stump Meta-Classifier

Malmasi¹,

Zampieri²

2016

Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

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This paper describes team MAZA entries for the 2016 SemEval Task 11: Complex Word Identification (CWI). The task is a binary classification task in which systems are trained to predict whether a word in a sentence is considered to be complex or not. We developed our two systems for this task based on classifier stacking using decision stumps and decision trees. Our best system, using contextual features, frequency information, and word and sentence length, achieved 91.2% accuracy and 30.8% F-Score. The system ranked 4 th among the 38 entries in the CWI task in terms of FScore.

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“…Straßenbahnhaltestelle ('tram stop'). Since people with dyslexia have difficulties with very long words [26] we included long words but not longer than 20 letters. For the Separation we chose functional words because of the same reason, people with dyslexia tend to have more errors with small and functional words [27].…”

Section: Target Word Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The levels of the exercises were designed considering the difficulties of people with dyslexia. They have more difficulties with less frequent and longer words [26,29] and words with complex morphology [27]. Hence, in higher difficulty levels, the target word is less frequent, longer and has a more complex morphology.…”

Section: Difficulty Levelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exercises for German-Speaking Children with Dyslexia

Rauschenberger

Füchsel

Rello³

et al. 2015

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2015

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Abstract. In this work-in-progress we present a computer-based method to design German reinforcement exercises for children with dyslexia. From different schools, we collected more than 1,000 errors written by children with dyslexia. Then, we created a classification of dyslexic errors in German and annotated the errors with different language specific features, such as phonetic and visual features. For the creation of the exercises we took into account the linguistic knowledge extracted from the analyses and designed more than 2,500 word exercises in German that have been integrated in a game available for iOS. The game and the resource of dyslexic errors are available online 1 and they are, to the best of our knowledge, the first contributions of this kind for German.

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Frequent Words Improve Readability and Short Words Improve Understandability for People with Dyslexia

Cited by 96 publications

References 46 publications

Measuring text simplification with the crowd

Measuring text simplification with the crowd

MAZA at SemEval-2016 Task 11: Detecting Lexical Complexity Using a Decision Stump Meta-Classifier

Exercises for German-Speaking Children with Dyslexia

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