Workshop LREC
Monday May 11 2020
Marseille, France​
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Invited Speaker
Arne Jönsson (Linköping University, Sweden)
Tools and services for text adaptation
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There are a variety of tools and resources for text adaptation, to make texts easier to read, including syntactic and lexical simplification and automatic text summarization. Related to these are a number of ways to measure, and visualise, a text's complexity, from simple measures trying to cover readability in one number to more refined measures trying to capture a text's complexity from various perspectives.
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The users of such tools and resources can broadly be divided in two groups: text producers and text consumers. Text consumers are a heterogenous group with different needs for text adaptation depending on their reading difficulties. Text producers such as journalists, communicators, authors, and teachers are also a heterogenous group with different needs that need to be accounted for.
The conference is cancelled but the proceedings will be published in May
(cf. Programme - accepted papers).
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Aims of the Workshop
The workshop aims at presenting current state-of-the-art techniques and achievements for text simplification together with existing reading aids and resources for lifelong learning. The materials are addressed to children struggling with difficulties in learning to read, to the community of teachers, speech-language pathologists and parents seeking solutions, but also to those professionals involved with adults struggling with reading (illiterates, aphasic readers, low vision readers, etc.).
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The workshop will address the issue from a variety of domains and languages, including natural language processing, linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychophysics of vision, and education.
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The workshop will act as a stimulus for the discussion of several ongoing research questions driving current and future research by bringing together researchers from various research communities involved with tackling difficulties in reading.
![Arne Jonsson stor 2016[2].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c75ba8_60459b16c5af466caac59d311a617938~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_235,h_180,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/Arne%20Jonsson%20stor%202016%5B2%5D.jpg)
Bridging the gap between available tools and resources and the different user groups is a less studied area. Given that few users can articulate their needs for text adaptation makes this even more challenging.
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In this talk we will present issues related to the design of useful services for text adaptation. Given the diversity we need to on the one hand capture the needs for the various users and on the other to design the services to ensure that they are usable. We will present results on the needs that various groups have and methods to conduct further studies.
