RI: Small: Simplifying Text for Individual Reading Needs

令人惊讶的是，大量美国人的阅读水平低于他们的年级水平，要么是因为受教育程度有限，要么是因为他们的母语不是英语。低阅读水平影响孩子？在学校和成人的进步？美国的就业机会以及限制信息获取。该项目旨在通过开发新的语言处理技术来选择和转换文本以获得较低阅读水平的材料，从而改善获取途径，并将当前侧重于摘要压缩的释义工作扩展为包括解释性扩展。此外，目标是开发可调整到特定领域和个人需求的自适应模型。该方法包括分析从网络上收集的可比较文本的语料库，开发旨在生成简化英语的释义模型，开发用于扩展或省略细节的话语敏感子句选择方法，以及探索促进领域和用户适应的语言表示。这项工作的语言处理贡献包括文本资源的开发，以支持教育应用中的语言技术，阅读困难的新表示，以及自动释义方法的进步。这个项目更广泛的影响包括让英语阅读能力有限的人更容易获得信息。此外，参与该项目的学生将有机会与当地学校的教师互动，以便更好地了解他们工作的影响并指导他们的方法，他们的工作将在华盛顿大学以多元化为导向的外展项目中展示。

A surprisingly large number of Americans read below their grade level, either because of limited education or because their native language is not English. Low reading levels impact a child?s progress in school and an adult?s job opportunities as well as limiting information access. This project aims to improve access by developing new language processing technology for selecting and transforming text to obtain material at lower reading levels, extending current paraphrasing work that focuses on summarization as compression to include explanatory expansions. In addition, the goal is to develop adaptive models that can be tuned to a specific domain and an individual's needs. The approach involves analyzing corpora of comparable text collected from the web, developing models of paraphrasing aimed at generating simplified English, developing a discourse-sensitive clause selection method for expanding or omitting details, and exploring representations of language that facilitate domain and user adaptation. The language processing contributions of this work include development of text resources to support language technology in education applications, new representations of reading difficulty, and advances in automatic methods of paraphrasing. The broader impact of this project includes making information more accessible to people with limited English reading proficiency. In addition, students working on the project will have the opportunity to interact with teachers from a local school so as to better understand the impact of their work and guide their approach, and their work will be showcased in University of Washington diversity-oriented outreach programs.