Improving Text Simplification for Diverse Audiences

Text simplification is a valuable tool for making complex texts more accessible to diverse audiences, including non-native speakers, children, and people with reading or cognitive disabilities. This article provides an overview of the existing research on text simplification, focusing on the task of rewriting text to improve comprehension. The study highlights the potential benefits of text simplification, including improved reading efficiency and enhanced comprehension, particularly for non-native speakers and children.
Approaches to Text Simplification
There are various approaches to text simplification, ranging from dedicated supervised systems to prompting black-box pre-trained models. These approaches aim to preserve the core meaning of the original text while making it easier to understand. The article discusses the strengths and limitations of each approach and highlights the need for further research to evaluate their effectiveness.
Evaluation of Text Simplification
The evaluation of automatically simplified texts is a crucial aspect of text simplification research. However, most studies have focused solely on sentence-level evaluations without considering the context in which the texts appear. The article argues that this oversight can lead to incomplete assessments and highlights the need for more comprehensive evaluations that take into account the text’s context.
Reading Comprehension and Text Simplification
The use of reading comprehension to evaluate automatically simplified texts is a relatively new area of research. Angrosh et al. (2014) were among the first to use reading comprehension to evaluate automatically simplified texts from multiple text simplification (TS) models, with non-native readers of English. Their study found that there were no significant differences in comprehension accuracy between different user groups when reading automatically generated simplifications. However, they noted that content removal can make some questions unanswerable, which may have influenced the results.
Conclusion
In conclusion, text simplification has the potential to improve the accessibility of complex texts for a wide range of audiences. While there are various approaches to text simplification, more research is needed to evaluate their effectiveness and to develop more comprehensive evaluations that take into account the text’s context. The use of reading comprehension to evaluate automatically simplified texts is an area of ongoing research, with promising results but also limitations that need to be addressed. By continuing to study and refine text simplification techniques, we can work towards creating more accessible and inclusive communication.