Simplifying Text for Language-Impaired Readers.
John Alexander Carroll, Guido Minnen, Darren Pearce, Yvonne Canning, Siobhan Devlin, John Irving Tait · 1999
Introduction Automatic text simplification for languageimpaired readers is a relatively unexplored area in natural language processing. We describe a generic system for text simplification (currently at the prototype stage) incorporating a range of state-of-the-art language processing tools. We are applying the system to help people with aphasia (various language impairments, typically occurring as a result of a stroke or head injury) to understand English newspaper articles 1 . Aphasic people may encounter many problems when reading. It has been demonstrated (Devlin, 1999) that these problems can be of a lexical nature since less frequent words are often not readily available, and also of a syntactic nature in that particular constructions may pose serious difficulties for understanding. In addition to these general aspects of text, there are also problems specific to newspaper text; for example, the often very compact summary-li