Simplification Strategies in French Spontaneous Speech
Lucía Ormaechea, Nikos Tsourakis, Didier Schwab, Pierrette Bouillon, Benjamin Lecouteux
Abstract
Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) aims at rewriting texts into simpler variants while preserving their original meaning, so they can be more easily understood by different audiences. While ATS has been widely used for written texts, its application to spoken language remains unexplored, even if it is not exempt from difficulty. This study aims to characterize the edit operations performed in order to simplify French transcripts for non-native speakers. To do so, we relied on a data sample randomly extracted from the Orféo-CEFC French spontaneous speech dataset. In the absence of guidelines to direct this process, we adopted an intuitive simplification approach, so as to investigate the crafted simplifications based on expert linguists’ criteria, and to compare them with those produced by a generative AI (namely, ChatGPT). The results, analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, reveal that the most common edits are deletions, and affect oral production aspects, like restarts or hesitations. Consequently, candidate simplifications are typically register-standardized sentences that solely include the propositional content of the input. The study also examines the alignment between human- and machine-based simplifications, revealing a moderate level of agreement, and highlighting the subjective nature of the task. The findings contribute to understanding the intricacies of simplifying spontaneous spoken language. In addition, the provision of a small-scale parallel dataset derived from such expert simplifications, Propicto-Orféo-Simple, can facilitate the evaluation of speech simplification solutions.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.determit-1.9
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on DeTermIt! Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context @ LREC-COLING 2024
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, Federica Vezzani, Liana Ermakova, Hosein Azarbonyad, Jaap Kamps
- Venues:
- DeTermIt | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 90–102
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.determit-1.9
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Lucía Ormaechea, Nikos Tsourakis, Didier Schwab, Pierrette Bouillon, and Benjamin Lecouteux. 2024. Simplification Strategies in French Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the Workshop on DeTermIt! Evaluating Text Difficulty in a Multilingual Context @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 90–102, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Simplification Strategies in French Spontaneous Speech (Ormaechea et al., DeTermIt-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.determit-1.9.pdf