Helping aphasic people process online information

Abstract. In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguation. We present a novel evaluation framework in lexical simplification that takes into account the level of ambiguity of the word to be simplified. The evaluation compares various instances of the lexical simplification system, a gold standard, and a baseline. On the basis of our results we recommend different resources and word sense disambiguation methods depending on the ambiguity level of the target word to be simplified.

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“…Baseline: As baseline we use the method of [12]. It replaces a word with its most frequent synonym, presumed to be the simplest.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing Resources for Spanish Lexical Simplification

Saggion

Bott

Rello

2013

Statistical Language and Speech Processing

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“…Another similar effort is Encyclopedia Britannica for Kids 11 where the information is adapted for kids, using different vocabulary and grammar to the classic encyclopedia Britannica. For Spanish, there is a website called Noticias Fácil 12 where daily news are shown using a simple language.…”

Section: Language Accessibility and Text Simplificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That is why numerous attempts have been made at creating automatic or semi-automatic text simplification systems, mainly applied to English [7], [8], but also to Japanese [9], Portuguese [10], and Spanish [6]. Many systems are directly applied to offer simpler reading material for specific target users, such as foreign language learners [11], readers with aphasia [12], low literacy individuals [10], etc.…”

Section: Language Accessibility and Text Simplificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An approach to treat numerical information in the text simplification process

Bautista

Hervás

Gervás

et al. 2015

Univ Access Inf Soc

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Abstract:Public information services and documents should be accessible to the widest possible readership. In particular, information from these sources often takes the form of numerical expressions, which pose comprehension problems for many people, including people with disabilities, who are often also exposed to poverty, illiteracy, or lack of access to advanced technology. This paper presents an approach to treat numerical information in the text simplification process to make it more accessible. A generic model for automatic text simplification systems is presented, aimed at making documents more accessible to readers with cognitive disabilities. The proposed approach is validated with a real system to simplify numerical expressions in Spanish. This system is then evaluated and the results show that it is appropriate for the task at hand.

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“…It is well known that long sentences, conjoined sentences, embedded clauses, passives, non-canonical word order, and use of lowfrequency words, among other things, increase text complexity for language-impaired readers [9,10,11]. Some of these problems have been addressed in different ways in the previous work on TS.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[14,15,8,16] tackle the generation of simplified texts by focusing on choices at the discourse level, trying to answer what choices (e.g., discourse relations, referring expressions, and cue phrases) are most appropriate for people with poor literacy. The PSET (Practical Simplification of English Texts) project [11] investigated how lexical-level and syntactic level choices affect readability for a special kind of readers -aphasics -without considering discourse choices.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Brazilian Portuguese automatic text simplification systems

Aluísio

Specia

Pardo

et al. 2008

Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

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In this paper we investigate the main linguistic phenomena that can make texts complex and how they could be simplified. We focus on a corpus analysis of simple account texts available on the web for Brazilian Portuguese and propose simplification strategies for this language. This study illustrates the need for text simplification to facilitate accessibility to information by poor literacy readers and potentially by people with other cognitive disabilities. It also highlights characteristics of simplification for Portuguese, which may differ from other languages. Such study consists of the first step towards building Brazilian Portuguese text simplification systems. One of the scenarios in which these systems could be used is that of reading electronic texts produced, e.g., by the Brazilian government or by relevant news agencies.

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Helping aphasic people process online information

Cited by 72 publications

References 2 publications

Comparing Resources for Spanish Lexical Simplification

Comparing Resources for Spanish Lexical Simplification

An approach to treat numerical information in the text simplification process

Towards Brazilian Portuguese automatic text simplification systems

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