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，要么是因为有限的教育，要么是因为他们的母语不是英语。低阅读水平影响了儿童-S在学校的进步，以及成年人-S的就业机会，以及限制信息的获取。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，扩大目前的释义工作，将重点放在摘要压缩上，以包括解释性扩展，从而改善获取的机会。此外，目标是开发可根据特定领域和个人需求进行调整的自适应模型。该方法包括分析从网上收集的可比文本语料库，开发旨在生成简化英语的释义模型，开发对语篇敏感的从句选择方法来扩展或省略细节，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开发文本资源以支持语言技术在教育应用中的应用，阅读难度的新表示，以及自动释义方法的进步。该项目的更广泛影响包括使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面向多元化的外联项目中展示。

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.