Can Numerical Expressions Be Simpler? Implementation and Demostration of a Numerical Simplification System for Spanish

Information in newspapers is often showed in the form of numerical expressions which present comprehension problems for many people, including people with disabilities, illiteracy or lack of access to advanced technology. The purpose of this paper is to motivate, describe, and demonstrate a rule-based lexical component that simplifies numerical expressions in Spanish texts. We propose an approach that makes news articles more accessible to certain readers by rewriting difficult numerical expressions in a simpler way. We will showcase the numerical simplification system with a live demo based on the execution of our components over different texts, and which will consider both successful and unsuccessful simplification cases.

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