Fostering Digital Inclusion and Accessibility: The PorSimples project for Simplification of Portuguese Texts

In this paper we present the PorSimples project, whose aim is to develop text adaptations tools for Brazilian Portuguese. The tools developed cater for both people at poor literacy levels and authors that want to produce texts for this audience. Here we describe the tools and resources developed over two years of this project and point directions for future work and collaboration. Since Portuguese and Spanish have many aspects in common, we believe our main point for collaboration lies in transferring our knowledge and experience to researches willing to developed simplification and elaboration tools for Spanish.

[1]  Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes,et al.  A corpus analysis of simple account texts and the proposal of simplification strategies: first steps towards text simplification systems , 2008, SIGDOC '08.

[2]  Caroline Gasperin,et al.  Challenging Choices for Text Simplification , 2010, PROPOR.

[3]  Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes,et al.  Adapting web content for low-literacy readers by using lexical elaboration and named entities labeling , 2010, New Rev. Hypermedia Multim..

[4]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language , 2004, Behavior research methods, instruments, & computers : a journal of the Psychonomic Society, Inc.

[5]  Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes,et al.  Towards Brazilian Portuguese automatic text simplification systems , 2008, DocEng '08.

[6]  Sandra M. Aluísio,et al.  Assigning Wh-Questions to Verbal Arguments: Annotation Tools Evaluation and Corpus Building , 2010, LREC.

[7]  Daniel Gildea,et al.  The Proposition Bank: An Annotated Corpus of Semantic Roles , 2005, CL.

[8]  Lucia Specia,et al.  Supporting the Adaptation of Texts for Poor Literacy Readers: a Text Simplification Editor for Brazilian Portuguese , 2009, BEA@NAACL.

[9]  Goiara Mendonça de Castilho,et al.  Normas de concretude para 909 palavras da língua portuguesa , 2007 .

[10]  Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes,et al.  Facilita: reading assistance for low-literacy readers , 2009, SIGDOC '09.

[11]  Ido Dagan,et al.  The Third PASCAL Recognizing Textual Entailment Challenge , 2007, ACL-PASCAL@ACL.

[12]  Maria Tereza Camargo Biderman,et al.  Dicionario ilustrado de portugues , 2008 .

[13]  D. J. Young.  Linguistic Simplification of SL Reading Material: Effective Instructional Practice? , 1999 .

[14]  Lucia Specia,et al.  Building a Brazilian Portuguese Parallel Corpus of Original and Simplified Texts , 2009 .

[15]  Lucia Specia,et al.  Learning When to Simplify Sentences for Natural Text Simplification , 2009 .

[16]  Advaith Siddharthan,et al.  Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion , 2006 .

[17]  Jill Burstein,et al.  Opportunities for Natural Language Processing Research in Education , 2009, CICLing.