Alector: A Parallel Corpus of Simplified French Texts with Alignments of Misreadings by Poor and Dyslexic Readers

Núria Gala, Anaïs Tack, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Thomas François, Johannes C. Ziegler

Abstract
In this paper, we present a new parallel corpus addressed to researchers, teachers, and speech therapists interested in text simplification as a means of alleviating difficulties in children learning to read. The corpus is composed of excerpts drawn from 79 authentic literary (tales, stories) and scientific (documentary) texts commonly used in French schools for children aged between 7 to 9 years old. The excerpts were manually simplified at the lexical, morpho-syntactic, and discourse levels in order to propose a parallel corpus for reading tests and for the development of automatic text simplification tools. A sample of 21 poor-reading and dyslexic children with an average reading delay of 2.5 years read a portion of the corpus. The transcripts of readings errors were integrated into the corpus with the goal of identifying lexical difficulty in the target population. By means of statistical testing, we provide evidence that the manual simplifications significantly reduced reading errors, highlighting that the words targeted for simplification were not only well-chosen but also substituted with substantially easier alternatives. The entire corpus is available for consultation through a web interface and available on demand for research purposes.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.169
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1353–1361
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.169
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Núria Gala, Anaïs Tack, Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Thomas François, and Johannes C. Ziegler. 2020. Alector: A Parallel Corpus of Simplified French Texts with Alignments of Misreadings by Poor and Dyslexic Readers. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1353–1361, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Alector: A Parallel Corpus of Simplified French Texts with Alignments of Misreadings by Poor and Dyslexic Readers (Gala et al., LREC 2020)
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