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A Review of Parallel Corpora for Automatic Text Simplification. Key Challenges Moving Forward

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Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13913))

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Abstract

This review of parallel corpora for automatic text simplification (ATS) involves an analysis of forty-nine papers wherein the corpora are presented, focusing on corpora in the Indo-European languages of Western Europe. We improve on recent corpora reviews by reporting on the target audience of the ATS, the language and domain of the source text, and other metadata for each corpus, such as alignment level, annotation strategy, and the transformation applied to the simplified text. The key findings of the review are: 1) the lack of resources that address ATS aimed at domains which are important for social inclusion, such as health and public administration; 2) the lack of resources aimed at audiences with mild cognitive impairment; 3) the scarcity of experiments where the target audience was directly involved in the development of the corpus; 4) more than half the proposals do not include any extra annotation, thereby lacking detail on how the simplification was done, or the linguistic phenomenon tackled by the simplification; 5) other types of annotation, such as the type and frequency of the transformation applied could identify the most frequent simplification strategies; and, 6) future strategies to advance the field of ATS could leverage automatic procedures to make the annotation process more agile and efficient.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.webofscience.com.

  2. 2.

    https://www.scopus.com.

  3. 3.

    https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted as part of the CLEAR.TEXT project (TED2021-130707B-I00), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR, and the R &D project CORTEX: Conscious Natural Text Generation (PID2021-123956OB-I00), funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”. Moreover, it has been also partially funded by the Generalitat Valenciana through the project “NL4DISMIS: Natural Language Technologies for dealing with dis- and misinformation with grant reference (CIPROM/2021/21)”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Philology, University of Alicante, 03690, Alicante, Spain

    Tania Josephine Martin

  2. University Institute for Computing Research, University of Alicante, 03690, Alicante, Spain

    Tania Josephine Martin & José Ignacio Abreu Salas

  3. Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Alicante, 03690, Alicante, Spain

    Paloma Moreda Pozo

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  1. Tania Josephine Martin
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  2. José Ignacio Abreu Salas
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  3. Paloma Moreda Pozo
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Correspondence to Tania Josephine Martin .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Métais

  2. University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Farid Meziane

  3. Oakland University, Rochester, NY, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

  4. University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Warren Manning

  5. University of Derby, Derby, UK

    Stephan Reiff-Marganiec

A Appendix

A Appendix

(See Table 2).

Table 2. Corpora Availability details on accessed date
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Martin, T.J., Abreu Salas, J.I., Moreda Pozo, P. (2023). A Review of Parallel Corpora for Automatic Text Simplification. Key Challenges Moving Forward. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Sugumaran, V., Manning, W., Reiff-Marganiec, S. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13913. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35320-8_5

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