Evaluating the Readability of Text Simplification Output for Readers with Cognitive Disabilities

Victoria Yaneva, Irina Temnikova, Ruslan Mitkov

Abstract
This paper presents an approach for automatic evaluation of the readability of text simplification output for readers with cognitive disabilities. First, we present our work towards the development of the EasyRead corpus, which contains easy-to-read documents created especially for people with cognitive disabilities. We then compare the EasyRead corpus to the simplified output contained in the LocalNews corpus (Feng, 2009), the accessibility of which has been evaluated through reading comprehension experiments including 20 adults with mild intellectual disability. This comparison is made on the basis of 13 disability-specific linguistic features. The comparison reveals that there are no major differences between the two corpora, which shows that the EasyRead corpus is to a similar reading level as the user-evaluated texts. We also discuss the role of Simple Wikipedia (Zhu et al., 2010) as a widely-used accessibility benchmark, in light of our finding that it is significantly more complex than both the EasyRead and the LocalNews corpora.
Anthology ID:
L16-1045
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
293–299
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1045
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Victoria Yaneva, Irina Temnikova, and Ruslan Mitkov. 2016. Evaluating the Readability of Text Simplification Output for Readers with Cognitive Disabilities. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 293–299, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating the Readability of Text Simplification Output for Readers with Cognitive Disabilities (Yaneva et al., LREC 2016)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/L16-1045.pdf
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