Development and verification of a user-friendly software for German text simplification focused on patients with cerebral palsy
Simon Strübbe, Irina N. Sidorenko, Susmita Roy, Alexander T. D. Grünwald, Renée Lampe · Natural Language Processing Journal · 2023
People with disabilities, especially those who have been diagnosed with cerebral palsy or other neurological diseases, are often not able to understand the text they are confronted with in their daily life. Important information, for example from the government, is manually translated by professionals into easy language suitable for these people, however, this method cannot be scaled-up to a large number of documents. We have developed a software that translates German text into a simpler version. The software, based on the easy language rules, shortens the text and replaces difficult words with synonyms. To maintain a correct grammar during the synonym replacement, the software recognizes the phrase containing the replaced word and conjugates the other words in this phrase, if needed. For the verification of the software developed, the grammatical correctness of the replacement was quantified by German native speakers and the text shortening was compared against the results of 12 healthy volunteer readers. The software provides an easy-to-use interface, which takes into account both the mental and physical difficulties of the impaired people. Therefore, one can assume that the software will be a helpful tool for the acquirement of text content for these people.