A multi-lingual and cross-domain analysis of features for text simplification

Regina Stodden, Laura Kallmeyer


Abstract
In text simplification and readability research, several features have been proposed to estimate or simplify a complex text, e.g., readability scores, sentence length, or proportion of POS tags. These features are however mainly developed for English. In this paper, we investigate their relevance for Czech, German, English, Spanish, and Italian text simplification corpora. Our multi-lingual and multi-domain corpus analysis shows that the relevance of different features for text simplification is different per corpora, language, and domain. For example, the relevance of the lexical complexity is different across all languages, the BLEU score across all domains, and 14 features within the web domain corpora. Overall, the negative statistical tests regarding the other features across and within domains and languages lead to the assumption that text simplification models may be transferable between different domains or different languages.
Anthology ID:
2020.readi-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Núria Gala, Rodrigo Wilkens
Venue:
READI
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
77–84
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.readi-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Regina Stodden and Laura Kallmeyer. 2020. A multi-lingual and cross-domain analysis of features for text simplification. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI), pages 77–84, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A multi-lingual and cross-domain analysis of features for text simplification (Stodden & Kallmeyer, READI 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.readi-1.12.pdf