Automating Easy Read Text Segmentation

Jesus Calleja, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Antonio David Ponce Martínez


Abstract
Easy Read text is one of the main forms of access to information for people with reading difficulties. One of the key characteristics of this type of text is the requirement to split sentences into smaller grammatical segments, to facilitate reading. Automated segmentation methods could foster the creation of Easy Read content, but their viability has yet to be addressed. In this work, we study novel methods for the task, leveraging masked and generative language models, along with constituent parsing. We conduct comprehensive automatic and human evaluations in three languages, analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed alternatives, under scarce resource limitations. Our results highlight the viability of automated Easy Read segmentation and remaining deficiencies compared to expert-driven human segmentation.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.694
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11876–11894
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.694
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jesus Calleja, Thierry Etchegoyhen, and Antonio David Ponce Martínez. 2024. Automating Easy Read Text Segmentation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11876–11894, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automating Easy Read Text Segmentation (Calleja et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.694.pdf