Horacio Saggion, talks about "Spanish Text Simplification in Simplext: Making Texts more Accessible"

April 12th, 2012 at 11:00 http://seminars.xrce.xerox.com/

Horacio Saggion, Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, will give a talk: "Spanish Text Simplification in Simplext: Making Texts more Accessible"

Abstract:

For people with cognitive disabilities access to textual information is often very difficult because texts written for the general public may be too difficult for them to read: just adapting the format of the text is not the solution in this case. One possibility to grant access to textual information for people with cognitive problems is to adapt and simplify texts manually. However, making easy-to-read versions of the current volume of textual information (or even a small proportion of it) would be impractical with human efforts alone. Automatic text simplification is a technology to produce adaptable texts by reducing their syntactic and lexical complexity so that they become readable for a target user group. Automatic text simplification products can be considered a kind of e-Accessibility devices with the potential of helping various user groups including elderly people, second language learners, and immigrants. In this talk I will describe our work in progress for the Simplext project which aims at developing text simplification technology in Spanish and for people with cognitive disabilities. Our work so far has produced a number of useful resources for text simplification (e.g. aligned corpus), a study of structural and lexical text simplification operations, and a prototype for reduction of structural complexity combining transduction rules and statistical filtering. I will also take the opportunity to present work being carried out at the TALN research group including initial work on patent processing, work in progress on production of personalized environmental reports, and specific research interest being pursued.