A Comparative Study of Educational Texts for Native, Foreign, and Bilingual Young Speakers of Russian : Are Simplified Texts Equally Simple?

Studies on simple language and simplification are often based on datasets of texts, either for children or learners of a second language. In both cases, these texts represent an example of simple language, but simplification likely involves different strategies. As such, this data may not be entirely homogeneous in terms of text simplicity. This study investigates linguistic properties and specific simplification strategies used in Russian texts for primary school children with different language backgrounds and levels of language proficiency. To explore the structure and variability of simple texts for young readers of different age groups, we have trained models for multiclass and binary classification. The models were based on quantitative features of texts. Subsequently, we evaluated the simplification strategies applied to readers of the same age with different linguistic backgrounds. This study is particularly relevant for the Russian language material, where the concept of easy and plain language has not been sufficiently investigated. The study revealed that the three types of texts cannot easily be distinguished from each other by judging the performance of multiclass models based on various quantitative features. Therefore, it can be said that texts of all types exhibit a similar level of accessibility to young readers. In contrast, binary classification tasks demonstrated better results, especially in the R-native vs. non R-native track (with 0.78 F1-score), these results may indicate that the strategies used for adapting or creating texts for each type of audience are different.Peer reviewe

A Quantitative Study of Simplification Strategies in Adapted Texts for L2 Learners of Russian

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 ABBYY PRODUCTION LLC. All rights reserved.Nowadays there has been a growing interest in the topic of Russian text adaptation, both in theoretical aspects of intralingual translation into Simple and Plain Russian, and in practical tasks like automatic text simplification. Therefore, it is important to study the characteristics that make an adapted text more accessible. In this paper, we aim to investigate the strategies that human experts employ when simplifying texts, particularly when the texts are being adapted for learners of Russian as a foreign language. The main data source for this research is the RuAdapt parallel corpus, which consists of Russian literature texts adapted for the learners of RaaFL and the original versions of these texts. We study the changes that occur during the adaptation process on lexical, morphological, and syntax level, and compare them to the methods usually described in methodological recommendations for teaching RaaFL.Peer reviewe

NILC-Metrix : assessing the complexity of written and spoken language in Brazilian Portuguese

This paper presents and makes publicly available the NILC-Metrix, a computational system comprising 200 metrics proposed in studies on discourse, psycholinguistics, cognitive and computational linguistics, to assess textual complexity in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). These metrics are relevant for descriptive analysis and the creation of computational models and can be used to extract information from various linguistic levels of written and spoken language. The metrics in NILC-Metrix were developed during the last 13 years, starting in 2008 with Coh-Metrix-Port, a tool developed within the scope of the PorSimples project. Coh-Metrix-Port adapted some metrics to BP from the Coh-Metrix tool that computes metrics related to cohesion and coherence of texts in English. After the end of PorSimples in 2010, new metrics were added to the initial 48 metrics of Coh-Metrix-Port. Given the large number of metrics, we present them following an organisation similar to the metrics of Coh-Metrix v3.0 to facilitate comparisons made with metrics in Portuguese and English. In this paper, we illustrate the potential of NILC-Metrix by presenting three applications: (i) a descriptive analysis of the differences between children's film subtitles and texts written for Elementary School I and II (Final Years); (ii) a new predictor of textual complexity for the corpus of original and simplified texts of the PorSimples project; (iii) a complexity prediction model for school grades, using transcripts of children's story narratives told by teenagers. For each application, we evaluate which groups of metrics are more discriminative, showing their contribution for each task

Efectos de simplificación de textos en la comprensión lectora de las personas con discapacidad intelectual

La presente tesis se presenta en la modalidad de “compendio de publicaciones” y está dedicada al análisis de las variables psicolingüísticas que afectan a la comprensión en la simplificación de textos dirigidos a lectores jóvenes de entre 16 y 23 años con DI. En este punto se hace necesaria la definición breve de dos conceptos que serán abordados con mayor profundidad a lo largo del compendio: 1) “simplificación de textos”, que entendemos como el proceso de reducir la complejidad lingüística de un texto mientras se mantiene la información y el significado original (Siddharthan, 2014), y 2) Discapacidad Intelectual, entendida como un trastornos del neuro-desarrollo caracterizado por déficits en funcionamiento intelectual y adaptativo que se presenta antes de los 18 años (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). “Simplificación de textos”, “adaptación de textos”, diseño de textos de “Lectura Fácil” o “controlados lingüísticamente” son todos términos similares empleados para designar un conjunto de técnicas que con frecuencia se combinan con la instrucción directa para mejorar la comprensión lectora de los lectores con dificultades (Arfé, Oakhill, y Pianta, 2014; Lundberg y Reichenberg, 2013; Morgan y Moni, 2008; Quigley y King, 1981-1984). Como adelantábamos en el párrafo anterior, este sería el caso de los estudiantes con DI, un colectivo que usualmente presenta habilidades lectoras por debajo de la esperada para su edad (Channell, Loveall, y Conners, 2013; van den Bos, Nakken, Nicolay, y van Houten, 2007). Teniendo estos conceptos centrales definidos, pasamos a explicar la estructura de la tesis. Dedicado pues a este tema, el compendio consta de 5 Estudios distribuidos en 3 artículos: cada artículo se compone de 2 Estudios, a excepción del primero, que contiene sólo uno

The text simplification in TERENCE

n this paper we present the TERENCE system of text simplification. The TERENCE simplification system is intended for use by researchers, educators and policy makers. The method is innovative in the field for two reasons. Firstly, differently from other methods of automatic or manual simplification, it offers a graded, cumulative, simplification of texts. Secondly, differently from other existing methods, it offers a system tailored for two groups of poor comprehenders (deaf and hearing). This paper illustrates the process of text simplification used in TERENCE and presents preliminary results of its testing with elementary school children