The impact of phrases on Italian lexical simplification

Automated lexical simplification has been performed so far focusing only on the replacement of single tokens with single tokens, and this choice has affected both the development of systems and the creation of benchmarks. In this paper, we argue that lexical simplification in real settings should deal both with single and multi-token terms, and present a benchmark created for the task. Besides, we describe how a freely available system can be tuned to cover also the simplification of phrases, and perform an evaluation comparing different experimental settings

Italian Event Detection Goes Deep Learning

This paper reports on a set of experiments with different word embeddings to initialize a state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM-CRF network for event detection and classification in Italian, following the EVENTI evaluation exercise. The net- work obtains a new state-of-the-art result by improving the F1 score for detection of 1.3 points, and of 6.5 points for classification, by using a single step approach. The results also provide further evidence that embeddings have a major impact on the performance of such architectures.Comment: to appear at CLiC-it 201

The Corpus of Basque Simplified Texts (CBST)

In this paper we present the corpus of Basque simplified texts. This corpus compiles 227 original sentences of science popularisation domain and two simplified versions of each sentence. The simplified versions have been created following different approaches: the structural, by a court translator who considers easy-to-read guidelines and the intuitive, by a teacher based on her experience. The aim of this corpus is to make a comparative analysis of simplified text. To that end, we also present the annotation scheme we have created to annotate the corpus. The annotation scheme is divided into eight macro-operations: delete, merge, split, transformation, insert, reordering, no operation and other. These macro-operations can be classified into different operations. We also relate our work and results to other languages. This corpus will be used to corroborate the decisions taken and to improve the design of the automatic text simplification system for Basque.Cerrar texto de financiación Itziar Gonzalez-Dios's work was funded by a Ph.D. grant from the Basque Government and a postdoctoral grant for the new doctors from the Vice-rectory of Research of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). We are very grateful to the translator and teacher that simplified the texts. We also want to thank Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell'Orletta and Giulia Venturi for their help with the Italian annotation scheme and their suggestions when analysing the corpus and Oier Lopez de Lacalle for his help with the statistical analysis. We also want to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Basque Government (IT344-10), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, EXTRECM Project (TIN2013-46616-C2-1-R)

Translationese and post-editese : how comparable is comparable quality?

Whereas post-edited texts have been shown to be either of comparable quality to human translations or better, one study shows that people still seem to prefer human-translated texts. The idea of texts being inherently different despite being of high quality is not new. Translated texts, for example,are also different from original texts, a phenomenon referred to as ‘Translationese’. Research into Translationese has shown that, whereas humans cannot distinguish between translated and original text,computers have been trained to detect Translationesesuccessfully. It remains to be seen whether the same can be done for what we call Post-editese. We first establish whether humans are capable of distinguishing post-edited texts from human translations, and then establish whether it is possible to build a supervised machine-learning model that can distinguish between translated and post-edited text

Adversarial Propagation and Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Word Vector Specialization

Semantic specialization is the process of fine-tuning pre-trained distributional word vectors using external lexical knowledge (e.g., WordNet) to accentuate a particular semantic relation in the specialized vector space. While post-processing specialization methods are applicable to arbitrary distributional vectors, they are limited to updating only the vectors of words occurring in external lexicons (i.e., seen words), leaving the vectors of all other words unchanged. We propose a novel approach to specializing the full distributional vocabulary. Our adversarial post-specialization method propagates the external lexical knowledge to the full distributional space. We exploit words seen in the resources as training examples for learning a global specialization function. This function is learned by combining a standard L2-distance loss with an adversarial loss: the adversarial component produces more realistic output vectors. We show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method across three languages and on three tasks: word similarity, dialog state tracking, and lexical simplification. We report consistent improvements over distributional word vectors and vectors specialized by other state-of-the-art specialization frameworks. Finally, we also propose a cross-lingual transfer method for zero-shot specialization which successfully specializes a full target distributional space without any lexical knowledge in the target language and without any bilingual data.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201

The Corpus of Basque Simplified Texts (CBST)

In this paper we present the corpus of Basque simplified texts. This corpus compiles 227 original sentences of science popularisation domain and two simplified versions of each sentence. The simplified versions have been created following different approaches: the structural, by a court translator who considers easy-to-read guidelines and the intuitive, by a teacher based on her experience. The aim of this corpus is to make a comparative analysis of simplified text. To that end, we also present the annotation scheme we have created to annotate the corpus. The annotation scheme is divided into eight macro-operations: delete, merge, split, transformation, insert, reordering, no operation and other. These macro-operations can be classified into different operations. We also relate our work and results to other languages. This corpus will be used to corroborate the decisions taken and to improve the design of the automatic text simplification system for Basque.Cerrar texto de financiación Itziar Gonzalez-Dios's work was funded by a Ph.D. grant from the Basque Government and a postdoctoral grant for the new doctors from the Vice-rectory of Research of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). We are very grateful to the translator and teacher that simplified the texts. We also want to thank Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell'Orletta and Giulia Venturi for their help with the Italian annotation scheme and their suggestions when analysing the corpus and Oier Lopez de Lacalle for his help with the statistical analysis. We also want to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Basque Government (IT344-10), and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, EXTRECM Project (TIN2013-46616-C2-1-R)

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

READ-IT: assessing readability of Italian texts with a view to text simplification

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ-IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic and syntactic information. In READ-IT readability assessment is carried out with respect to both documents and sentences where the latter represents an important novelty of the proposed approach creating the prerequisites for aligning the readability assessment step with the text simplification process. READ-IT shows a high accuracy in the document classification task and promising results in the sentence classification scenario