Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications

Extracting ontologies from software documentation: a semi-automatic method and its evaluation

Rich and generic ontologies about web service functionalities are a prerequisite for performing complex reasoning tasks with web service descriptions. However, their acquisition is timeconsuming and conditioned by the small number of web services available in certain domains. As a solution, we describe a semiautomatic method to extract such ontologies from software documentation, motivated by the observation that web services reflect the functionality of their underlying implementation. Further, we report on fine-tuning the extraction process by using a multi-stage evaluation method

From software APIs to web service ontologies: a semi-automatic extraction method

Successful employment of semantic web services depends on the availability of high quality ontologies to describe the domains of these services. As always, building such ontologies is difficult and costly, thus hampering web service deployment. Our hypothesis is that since the functionality offered by a web service is reflected by the underlying software, domain ontologies could be built by analyzing the documentation of that software. We verify this hypothesis in the domain of RDF ontology storage tools.We implemented and fine-tuned a semi-automatic method to extract domain ontologies from software documentation. The quality of the extracted ontologies was verified against a high quality hand-built ontology of the same domain. Despite the low linguistic quality of the corpus, our method allows extracting a considerable amount of information for a domain ontology

Lexical simplification for the systematic support of cognitive accessibility guidelines

The Internet has come a long way in recent years, contributing to the proliferation of large volumes of digitally available information. Through user interfaces we can access these contents, however, they are not accessible to everyone. The main users affected are people with disabilities, who are already a considerable number, but accessibility barriers affect a wide range of user groups and contexts of use in accessing digital information. Some of these barriers are caused by language inaccessibility when texts contain long sentences, unusual words and complex linguistic structures. These accessibility barriers directly affect people with cognitive disabilities. For the purpose of making textual content more accessible, there are initiatives such as the Easy Reading guidelines, the Plain Language guidelines and some of the languagespecific Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines provide documentation, but do not specify methods for meeting the requirements implicit in these guidelines in a systematic way. To obtain a solution, methods from the Natural Language Processing (NLP) discipline can provide support for achieving compliance with the cognitive accessibility guidelines for the language. The task of text simplification aims at reducing the linguistic complexity of a text from a syntactic and lexical perspective, the latter being the main focus of this Thesis. In this sense, one solution space is to identify in a text which words are complex or uncommon, and in the case that there were, to provide a more usual and simpler synonym, together with a simple definition, all oriented to people with cognitive disabilities. With this goal in mind, this Thesis presents the study, analysis, design and development of an architecture, NLP methods, resources and tools for the lexical simplification of texts for the Spanish language in a generic domain in the field of cognitive accessibility. To achieve this, each of the steps present in the lexical simplification processes is studied, together with methods for word sense disambiguation. As a contribution, different types of word embedding are explored and created, supported by traditional and dynamic embedding methods, such as transfer learning methods. In addition, since most of the NLP methods require data for their operation, a resource in the framework of cognitive accessibility is presented as a contribution.Internet ha avanzado mucho en los últimos años contribuyendo a la proliferación de grandes volúmenes de información disponible digitalmente. A través de interfaces de usuario podemos acceder a estos contenidos, sin embargo, estos no son accesibles a todas las personas. Los usuarios afectados principalmente son las personas con discapacidad siendo ya un número considerable, pero las barreras de accesibilidad afectan a un gran rango de grupos de usuarios y contextos de uso en el acceso a la información digital. Algunas de estas barreras son causadas por la inaccesibilidad al lenguaje cuando los textos contienen oraciones largas, palabras inusuales y estructuras lingüísticas complejas. Estas barreras de accesibilidad afectan directamente a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva. Con el fin de hacer el contenido textual más accesible, existen iniciativas como las pautas de Lectura Fácil, las pautas de Lenguaje Claro y algunas de las pautas de Accesibilidad al Contenido en la Web (WCAG) específicas para el lenguaje. Estas pautas proporcionan documentación, pero no especifican métodos para cumplir con los requisitos implícitos en estas pautas de manera sistemática. Para obtener una solución, los métodos de la disciplina del Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (PLN) pueden dar un soporte para alcanzar la conformidad con las pautas de accesibilidad cognitiva relativas al lenguaje La tarea de la simplificación de textos del PLN tiene como objetivo reducir la complejidad lingüística de un texto desde una perspectiva sintáctica y léxica, siendo esta última el enfoque principal de esta Tesis. En este sentido, un espacio de solución es identificar en un texto qué palabras son complejas o poco comunes, y en el caso de que sí hubiera, proporcionar un sinónimo más usual y sencillo, junto con una definición sencilla, todo ello orientado a las personas con discapacidad cognitiva. Con tal meta, en esta Tesis, se presenta el estudio, análisis, diseño y desarrollo de una arquitectura, métodos PLN, recursos y herramientas para la simplificación léxica de textos para el idioma español en un dominio genérico en el ámbito de la accesibilidad cognitiva. Para lograr esto, se estudia cada uno de los pasos presentes en los procesos de simplificación léxica, junto con métodos para la desambiguación del sentido de las palabras. Como contribución, diferentes tipos de word embedding son explorados y creados, apoyados por métodos embedding tradicionales y dinámicos, como son los métodos de transfer learning. Además, debido a que gran parte de los métodos PLN requieren datos para su funcionamiento, se presenta como contribución un recurso en el marco de la accesibilidad cognitiva.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: José Antonio Macías Iglesias.- Secretario: Israel González Carrasco.- Vocal: Raquel Hervás Ballestero