Revisiting materials for teaching languages for specific purposes

Teaching materials in languages for specific purposes have evolved in the last few years dramatically. The Internet currently plays a significant role in such development and has permitted both a wider range of resources and its free availability almost anywhere in the World. This paper presents a selection of different types of recent materials for English for Specific Purposes. The paper begins by defining ESP. Then it approaches how materials should shape the student’s own learning, how materials should be selected according to the different skills and then emphasizes the importance of the Internet as a source of materials. The paper concludes with a set of ideas for the future development of ESP materials. The final goal of this paper is to provide the readers with valuable tools that can enhance their teaching through accessible mean

A Review of Research-Based Automatic Text Simplification Tools

In the age of knowledge, the democratisation of information facilitated through the Internet may not be as pervasive if written language poses challenges to particular sectors of the population. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of research-based automatic text simplification tools. Consequently, we describe aspects such as the language, language phenomena, language levels simplified, approaches, specific target populations these tools are created for (e.g. individuals with cognitive impairment, attention deficit, elderly people, children, language learners), and accessibility and availability considerations. The review of existing studies covering automatic text simplification tools is undergone by searching two databases: Web of Science and Scopus. The eligibility criteria involve text simplification tools with a scientific background in order to ascertain how they operate. This methodology yielded 27 text simplification tools that are further analysed. Some of the main conclusions reached with this review are the lack of resources accessible to the public, the need for customisation to foster the individual’s independence by allowing the user to select what s/he finds challenging to understand while not limiting the user’s capabilities and the need for more simplification tools in languages other than English, to mention a few.This research was conducted as part of the Clear-Text project (TED2021-130707B-I00), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR

Traducción de frases del español ‘original’ al español ‘simplificado’

Text Simplification (TS) aims to convert complex sentences into their simpler variants, which are more accessible to wider audiences. Several recent studies addressed this problem as a monolingual machine translation (MT) problem (translating from ‘original’ to ‘simplified’ language instead of translating from one language into another) using the standard phrase-based statistical machine translation (PB-SMT) model. We investigate whether the same approach would be equally successful regardless of the type of simplification we wish to learn (given that different target audiences require different levels of simplification). Our preliminary results indicate that the standard PB-SMT model might not be able to learn the strong simplifications which are needed for certain users, e.g. people with Down's syndrome. Additionally, we show that the phrase-tables obtained during the translation process seem to be able to capture some adequate lexical simplifications.La Simplificación de Textos (ST) tiene como objetivo la conversión de oraciones complejas en variantes más sencillas, que serán más accesibles para un público más amplio. Algunos estudios recientes han abordado este problema como un problema de traducción automática (TA) monolingüe (traducir de lengua ‘original’ a ‘simplificada’ en lugar de traducir de un idioma a otro), utilizando el modelo estándar de traducción automática basado en frases. En este estudio, investigamos si el mismo enfoque tendrá el mismo éxito independientemente del tipo de simplificación que se quiera estudiar, dado que cada público meta requiere diferentes niveles de simplificación. Nuestros resultados preliminares indican que el modelo estándar podrá no ser capaz de aprender las fuertes simplificaciones que se necesitan para algunos usuarios, e.g. gente con el síndrome de Down. Además, mostramos que las tablas de traducción obtenidas durante el proceso de traducción parecen ser capaces de capturar algunas simplificaciones léxicas adecuadas

Target-Level Sentence Simplification as Controlled Paraphrasing

Automatic text simplification aims to reduce the linguistic complexity of a text in order to make it easier to understand and more accessible. However, simplified texts are consumed by a diverse array of target audiences and what might be appropriately simplified for one group of readers may differ considerably for another. In this work we investigate a novel formulation of sentence simplification as paraphrasing with controlled decoding. This approach aims to alleviate the major burden of relying on large amounts of in-domain parallel training data, while at the same time allowing for modular and adaptive simplification. According to automatic metrics, our approach performs competitively against baselines that prove more difficult to adapt to the needs of different tar- get audiences or require significant amounts of complex-simple parallel aligned data

Maximizing Enrollment for Kids: Results From a Diagnostic Assessment of Enrollment and Retention in Eight States

Examines strengths, challenges, and areas for improvement in Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Plan enrollment and retention systems, policies, and procedures for children in eight grantee states. Outlines best practices in simplifying processes