Presentation at NLDB 2011

In this talk I will give an overview of research in the area of Natural Language Processing aiming at facilitating access to textual information online. I will review the role of text summarization, question answering, and information extraction in making textual information more accessible.

I will also discuss the issue of access to textual information for people with learning disabilities and present the ongoing work in this area of the Simplext project which aims at producing a text simplification system to facilitate easy access to textual information.