Simplifying Text

"Closed captioning and transcripts are among the tools that have been found to be very useful for alleviating difficulties with reading, spelling, writing, comprehension, and focus."

"Make your information accessible! Having information is important for people with intellectual disabilities. To learn new things. To take part in society. To know their rights and stand up for them. To decide and make their own choices. People with intellectual disabilities have the right to get information that is easy to read and understand."

"... we propose a Multi-Perspective Context Matching (MPCM) model, which is an end-to-end system that directly predicts the answer beginning and ending points in a passage ... Experimental result on the test set of SQuAD shows that our model achieves a competitive result on the leaderboard."

"We’re turning the world’s leading AI research into transformative business applications."

"Teaching machines to read natural language documents remains an elusive challenge. Machine reading systems can be tested on their ability to answer questions posed on the contents of documents that they have seen, but until now large scale training and test datasets have been missing for this type of evaluation. In this work we define a new methodology that resolves this bottleneck and provides large scale supervised reading comprehension data. This allows us to develop a class of […]

"Dr. Will Scott, IBM’s Lead Software Architect on the project, explains further. “Using a cloud-based infrastructure and cognitive computing, Content Clarifier analyzes and condenses content into clearer language, such as by substituting euphemisms with more straightforward verbiage, by adding visuals, or by inserting contextually relevant semantic content (i.e., maps, web resources, phonetic pronunciations). It greatly simplifies the task of reading with the end goal being to increase […]

"The objective of this technique is to ensure that the text of the Web page is not difficult to read. Users with disabilities that make it difficult to decode words and sentences are likely to have trouble reading and understanding complex text. If the text does not require reading ability more advanced than the lower secondary education level, no supplements or alternative versions are needed."

"The best way for AI machines to learn is by feeding them huge data sets of annotated examples, and the Daily Mail has unwittingly created one."

"This study addresses the automatic simplification of texts in Spanish in order to make them more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. A corpus analysis of original and manually simplified news articles was undertaken in order to identify and quantify relevant operations to be implemented in a text simplification system. The articles were further compared at sentence and text level by means of automatic feature extraction and various machine learning classification algorithms, […]

In this paper, we compare alternative techniques for evaluating a software system for simplifying the readability of texts for adults with mild intellectual disabilities (ID). Using a Wizard-of-Oz prototype, we conducted experiments with a group of adults with ID to test alternative formats of questions to measure comprehension of the information in the news articles. We have found that some forms of questions work well at measuring the difficulty level of a text: multiple-choice questions with […]