A text-writing system for Easy-to-Read German evaluated with low-literate users with cognitive impairment

Ina Steinmetz, Karin Harbusch


Abstract
Low-literate users with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) and/or complex communication needs (CCN) require specific writing support. We present a system that interactively supports fast and correct writing of a variant of Leichte Sprache (LS; German term for easy-to-read German), slightly extended within and beyond the inner-sentential syntactic level. The system provides simple and intuitive dialogues for selecting options from a natural-language paraphrase generator. Moreover, it reminds the user to add text elements enhancing understandability, audience design, and text coherence. In earlier development phases, the system was evaluated with different groups of substitute users. Here, we report a case study with seven low-literate users with IDD.
Anthology ID:
2022.in2writing-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2022)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Vipul Raheja, Dongyeop Kang, John Joon Young Chung, Daniel Gissin, Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero
Venue:
In2Writing
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
27–38
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.in2writing-1.4
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.in2writing-1.4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ina Steinmetz and Karin Harbusch. 2022. A text-writing system for Easy-to-Read German evaluated with low-literate users with cognitive impairment. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants (In2Writing 2022), pages 27–38, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A text-writing system for Easy-to-Read German evaluated with low-literate users with cognitive impairment (Steinmetz & Harbusch, In2Writing 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.in2writing-1.4.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.in2writing-1.4.mp4
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