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Text simplification resources for Spanish

  • SI: Resources for language learning
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Abstract

In this paper we present the development of a text simplification system for Spanish. Text simplification is the adaptation of a text for the special needs of certain groups of readers, such as language learners, people with cognitive difficulties, and elderly people, among others. There is a clear need for simplified texts, but manual production and adaptation of existing text is labour-intensive and costly. Automatic simplification is a field which attracts growing attention in Natural Language Processing, but, to the best of our knowledge, there are no existing simplification tools for Spanish. We present a corpus study which aims to identify the operations a text simplification system needs to carry out in order to produce an output similar to what human editors produce when they simplify news texts. We also present a first prototype for automatic simplification, which shows that the most important simplification operations can be successfully treated.

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Notes

  1. http://www.un.org/disabilities.

  2. http://www.fundacionprodis.org/.

  3. http://www.lecturafacil.net/.

  4. http://www.lattlast.se/.

  5. http://8sidor.lattlast.se.

  6. http://www.klartale.no.

  7. http://cours.funoc.be/essentiel/.

  8. http://www.wablieft.be.

  9. http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Ligetil/Presse/Artikler/om.htm.

  10. http://www.dueparole.it.

  11. http://papunet.net/selko.

  12. http://www.noticiasfacil.es.

  13. http://www.literacyworks.org/learningresources/.

  14. http://www.inclusion-europe.org.

  15. http://simple.wikipedia.org.

  16. Corpus de referencia del español actual, http://www.rae.es.

  17. They report an improvement from 61.6 to 78.2 % of accuracy when including syntax and morpho-syntax in addition to basic counts and lexical information.

  18. For example the sentence Álex de la Iglesia, the director of the Academy, announced his resignation contains the information that Álex de la Iglesia is the director of the Academy, which can be expressed in a separate sentence.

  19. Corpus de referencia del español actual, http://www.rae.es.

  20. Light-to-right order in the tree does not necessarily represent linear order of words in the sentence.

  21. Such errors included cases where a preposition required by the construction was missing (such as a/in in the case of (i-a)) or an article was wrongly inserted before a proper name (as este/this in (i-b)).

    The errors which were encountered were later corrected by improving the rules. The sentences used for rule improvement are excluded from the test set for future evaluations.

  22. The annotation scheme did not allow us to calculate recall for the two different relative clause splitting operations separately and these values are not listed in Table 4.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to five anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments and insights which helped us improve the final version of the paper. We would also like to thank Simon Mille for his substantial help with the MATE grammar framework. The research described in this paper arises from a Spanish research project called Simplext: An automatic system for text simplification (http://www.simplext.es). Simplext is led by Technosite and partially funded by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade of the Government of Spain, through the National Plan of Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation (I+D+i), within the strategic Action of Telecommunications and Information Society (Avanza Competitiveness, with file number TSI-020302-2010-84). We are grateful to the fellowship RYC-2009-04291 from Programa Ramón y Cajal 2009 and to the project SKATER-UPF-TALN (TIN2012-38584-C06-03), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, Spain. We are grateful to Biljana Drndarevic for proofreading the paper.

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  1. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, C/Tanger 122, 08018, Barcelona, Spain

    Stefan Bott & Horacio Saggion

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Correspondence to Horacio Saggion.

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Bott, S., Saggion, H. Text simplification resources for Spanish. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 93–120 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-014-9265-4

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