=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3625/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=
Towards An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Framework to Automatically Adapt Short Stories in Spanish into Easier and Accessible Versions
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3625/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-3625
|authors=Isam Diab
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/sepln/Diab23
}}
==
Towards An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based Framework to Automatically Adapt Short Stories in Spanish into Easier and Accessible Versions
==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3625/paper2.pdf
Towards An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based
Framework to Automatically Adapt Short Stories in
Spanish into Easier and Accessible Versions
Isam Diab1
1
Ontology Engineering Group (OEG), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain
Abstract
The Easy-to-Read (E2R) Methodology was created with the aim of presenting clear and easily understood
documents to improve the daily life of people who present reading comprehension difficulties, such as
persons with cognitive disabilities. To do that, the methodology provides a set of guidelines regarding
both writing and layout aspects. However, the E2R guidelines are applied manually to create easy-to-read
text materials, which demands considerable resources and effort. To help in such a manual process, and
considering that cultural materials, in general, and literary materials, in particular, should be accessible
for all, our research objective is to develop (a) a technological framework for (semi)-automatically
adapting short stories in Spanish into easier and accessible versions close to the E2R principles, and (b) an
evaluation framework to ensure that the easier versions of the short stories provided by the technological
framework preserve the content and semantics of the original versions. In this regard, the developed
technological framework should be useful to help (a) different target groups who present comprehension
difficulties (e.g. people with cognitive disabilities, low literacy skills or nonnative speakers) and (b) E2R
professionals in terms of streamlining the task of text adaptation.
Keywords
Cognitive Accessibility, Text Adaptation, Easy-to-Read Methodology, Artificial Intelligence
1. Introduction and Motivation
People with cognitive disabilities have some difficulties related to reading comprehension. Over
the last decade, the need for comprehensible and accessible materials for people with learning
difficulties has received increased attention in the social sphere [1]. In that sense, a methodology
called Easy-to-Read (E2R) [2, 3, 4, 5] was created to present clear and easily understood contents
to different sectors of the population that include people with cognitive disabilities and people
with limited reading proficiency, among others. The methodology provides a collection of
guidelines and recommendations related to both writing and layout aspects, such as avoiding
the use of complex syntax, long words, or metaphorical and figurative language, for instance.
However, this methodology presents three main limitations: (a) it lacks clear information on
how to apply the guidelines and recommendations; (b) the guidelines it proposes are general,
i.e. there is no specific information for adapting different types of texts; and (c) it relies heavily
on manual adaptation, a highly time-consuming and subjective task.
Doctoral Symposium on Natural Language Processing from the Proyecto ILENIA, 28 September 2023, Jaén, Spain.
Envelope-Open isam.diab@upm.es (I. Diab)
Orcid 0000-0002-3967-0672 (I. Diab)
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
To cover these identified gaps, our research is focused on applying different Artificial Intelli-
gence (AI) methods and techniques to (semi)-automatically1 perform, in particular, both the
analysis and adaptation based on the E2R Methodology2 of short stories3 written in Spanish.
The motivation for leaning towards this specific type of text for our research is based on the
following three reasons:
1. Variety of linguistic aspects. Short stories harbour wide vocabulary registers, different
syntactic structures, pragmatic implications and heterogeneous semantics.
2. Fixed structure. This type of texts generally present a tripartite organisation: introduc-
tion, development and denouement. In addition, they are of moderate length.
3. Social impact. The processes involved in reading comprehension are essential for
people’s cognitive development [6]. Furthermore, the act of reading literary texts is seen
as part of a wider process of human development and growth based on understanding
both one’s own experience and the social world [7]. On this account, cultural materials,
in general, and literary materials such as short stories, in particular, should be accessible
for all.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 is devoted to the state-of-the-art on
the automatic approaches for both checking the E2R guidelines in texts and for adapting texts
in Spanish into simpler versions. In Section 3 we pose the Open Research Problem as well as
the Hypothesis and Research Questions in which we base this PhD thesis. For its part, Section
4 explains the main Objective and the different Sub-Objectives of this research. We proceed
with the Research Methodology in Section 5, and Section 6 shows some Ongoing Work carried
out to date. Finally, we present conclusions and further research.
2. State of the Art
The already introduced Easy-to-Read (E2R) Methodology plays a decisive role in the process of
adapting materials. However, as mentioned, its main drawback lies in the manual adaptation
method, which demands considerable resources and effort. To address this limitation and make
the process more efficient, there are semi-automatic tools both for checking the E2R guidelines
in texts and for providing simpler adaptations in Spanish. On the E2R assessment, we can
mention Easy-to-Read Advisor [8], an E2R conformance checker for assessing a particular
document with respect to the E2R guidelines, and FACILE [9], an extension and improvement
of Easy-to-Read Advisor. On the other hand, considering the automatic adaptation of texts into
simpler versions, we can point out the following approaches based on simplification techniques:
Simplext [10], LexSIS [11], DysWebxia or [12] and EASIER [13]. These existing works are based
on simplification techniques at both lexical and syntactic levels. Regarding lexical simplification,
1
We refer to a semi-automatic adaptation in the sense that we cannot assume that such an adaptation is
completely accurate, so in many cases it will be the adapter who tailors the text to the appropriate context.
2
The automatic adaptation can be considered an intralinguistic automatic translation. However, we decided to
use the word adaptation along the research since this is the most appropriate terminology in the E2R area.
3
In Literature, a short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a
self-contained incident or series of linked incidents.
the tool presented in LexSIS [11] employs three techniques to find a simpler lexical substitute: a
word-based vector model, word frequency, and word length. To make such a substitution for a
simpler candidate, it relies on semantic resources available online such as OpenThesaurus4 and
the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA5 ). The work presented in DysWebxia [12]
makes use of LexSIS [11] to replace words that have been identified as complex for people with
dyslexia by synonyms that fit their comprehension needs. For its part, the system proposed
in EASIER [13] identifies complex words using Support-Vector Machines (SVM) algorithms
and replaces them with easier synonyms by consulting external open-access resources such
as BabelNet6 and OpenThesaurus. In the framework of the Simplext project [10], we find a
double automatic simplification: on the one hand, lexical, based on the implementation of
LexSIS and a rule-based simplification; and on the other hand, syntactic. On such a syntactic
simplification, they make use of a hand-written computational grammar and focus on reducing
sentence complexity.
However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no research work oriented towards the
automatic adaptation of a specific literary text type such as short stories or short narratives
into easy-to-read versions in Spanish (in languages other than Spanish it is worth mentioning
ERNESTA tool [14], in which the authors have worked on the syntactic simplification of short
stories in Italian developing a system which focuses on (a) resolving anaphoric references and
(b) rewriting sentences in a simpler form using the present tense of verbs). In this regard, it is
important to note that the typology of a text is crucial when considering its adaptation, since
not all text types share similar linguistic properties and, therefore, a general adaptation of texts
is not valid for all typologies. On the other hand, as we mentioned, all existing work focuses on
automatically simplifying texts, but we must cautiously discern that simplifying and adapting
do not point to similar processes, since adapting implies taking into account the needs of target
users, while simplifying focuses on reducing the complexity of formal aspects of a text without
necessarily taking into account the target user. Thus, an adaptation must be based on user
research in order to be useful in terms of functionality.
3. Open Research Problem, Hypothesis and Research Questions
Based on the foregoing, the Open Research Problem (ORP) in which our research objectives
are based is “The number of adapted short stories in Spanish into easy-to-read versions is quite
scarce. Thus, literature is limited for people with reading comprehension difficulties”.
In this line, our research work raises the following Research Hypothesis (RH): “The (semi)-
automatic adaptation of short stories written in Spanish into easier versions close to the E2R
Methodology is possible and the resulting adapted versions will maintain the content and
semantic information for people with cognitive disabilities”. Having considered both the Open
Research Problem (ORP) and the Research Hypothesis (RH), the following Research Questions
(RQ) can be proposed:
4
https://www.openthesaurus.de/
5
https://www.rae.es/banco-de-datos/crea
6
https://babelnet.org/
• RQ1. Which AI-based techniques and methods can be used in the automatic adaptation
of short stories in Spanish?
• RQ2. Which metrics (indices or formulas) can be useful for assessing the reading com-
prehension of automatically adapted short stories by people with cognitive disabilities?
• RQ3. Are the adapted versions by the technological framework faithful to the content
and semantics of the original versions?
4. Objective and Sub-Objectives
As a first attempt, the Research Objective (RO) of this work in progress is to develop (a) a
technological framework for adapting (semi)-automatically short stories in Spanish into easier
versions close to the E2R Methodology, and (b) an evaluation framework to ensure that the easier
versions of the short stories provided by the technological framework preserve the content and
semantics of the original versions.
Hence, to achieve our propose, the sub-objectives (SOs) that could be proposed are the
following:
• SO1. To identify the main cognitive difficulties in short stories regarding reading compre-
hension by people with cognitive disabilities. This identification will be experiment-based
involving user studies.
• SO2. To determine and classify the different linguistic criteria (in Spanish) related to
the identified cognitive problems, in order to select (a) which E2R guidelines should be
included in our framework, and (b) to establish a priority order for the guidelines to be
included in the framework.
• SO3. To determine which AI-based methods and techniques should be considered in
the technological framework development; and thus used them in the automation of the
guidelines.
• SO4. To evaluate whether the adapted versions of short stories provided by the techno-
logical framework maintain both the content and semantics of the original versions.
5. Research Methodology
In order to achieve the aforementioned objectives and bear the hypothesis out, the current
research work is structured into three stages:
1. User-based Studies. In this first stage we conducted an exhaustive analysis of the
cognitive and linguistic issues that affect the readability of short stories, in order to
complete the information provided by the E2R Methodology on how to apply it. To
achieve this goal, user-based studies are needed. Thus, we designed and set in some
studies to find the linguistic aspects involving reading comprehension difficulties.
This stage is directly related to the SO1.
2. Technological Framework Development. In this second stage we will (a) select which
guidelines should be included in the framework and (b) establish a priority order based on
the results obtained in the user studies, with the aim of automating the selected guidelines
by means of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods and techniques such as Natural Language
Processing (NLP), Pattern Matching, or Machine Learning.
3. Evaluation Framework Development. The latter stage will cover the evaluation
of the previous processes. Since it will involve persons with cognitive disabilities, the
evaluation will also include user studies. In this stage we will implement readability and
understandability values to analyse whether the (semi)-automatically adapted versions of
short stories maintain both the content and semantics of the original versions.
Stages 2 and 3 will be iterative and they are related to SO2, SO3 and SO4.
Figure 1: Iterative process of the work plan stages.
In more detail, considering both the objective and sub-objectives and the stages in which the
research is structured, the distribution schedule of the different tasks is presented in Figure 2,
organised over the four years foreseen.
Figure 2: Gantt chart of the research plan.
6. Ongoing Work
We are currently in the first stage of the PhD thesis, in which, thanks to the collaboration with
several institutions in Spain, we have launched a user study to gather data on the problems
that affect reading comprehension of persons with cognitive disabilities. More than 70 users
with cognitive or intellectual disabilities participated in this study, including a small group of
validators (i.e. people with disabilities who are familiar with the E2R methodology guidelines).
In order to extract the cognitive-linguistic problems in the participants’ reading comprehension
of short stories, we based the user study on questionnaires7 in which we asked participants
about different short stories (we collected a corpus of texts ranging from 100 to 350 lines in
length each), by proposing questions based on free recall methods, induced recall methods, and
metacognitive questions.
After extracting the data, we observed that the problems or difficulties in terms of reading
comprehension of short stories are grouped in the following different linguistic dimensions:
• Vocabulary. Participants present diffuculties regarding infrequent words, or adverbs
ending in -mente (-ly in English).
• Syntax. Structures as clause chains (complex subordinate and coordinated constructions),
juxtaposition clauses, or tempo-causal appositions, raise a problem for people with reading
comprehension difficulties.
• Figurative Language. The use of figurative language such as metaphors in morals are
very common in this type of text, which poses a major problem in the literal comprehen-
sion of the narratives.
• Cohesion and Coherence. Likewise, this type of text, as it is narrative, presents
challenges when there appear, for example, anaphoric references to characters (it is
preferable to always use proper names instead of pronouns or other reference marks),
spatio-temporal inferences of events (discourse markers should be used to organise the
narrative clearly), or ambiguity in references to different characters (the use of pronouns
pointing to more than one character can cause confusion).
• Layout. In this dimension the focus is mainly on the format of the dialogues, as they
should appear in a theatrical style (i.e. giving prior notice of who the speaker is before
the introductory hyphen).
Considering these dimensions, we now have a roadmap on which aspects should be addressed
in the second stage regarding the technical framework development.
Furthermore, alongside the launch of the user study, we have been analysing which AI techniques
may be the most suitable for our development by implementing several proofs-of-concept based
on E2R guidelines, such as to avoid the use of verbal periphrases, to avoid the use of adverbs
ending in -mente and superlative forms, to avoid the use of abbreviations and acronyms, to avoid
the use of passive voice, or to avoid the use of lexical repetitions. To implement such proofs-of-
concept we have mainly relied on Natural Language Processing (NLP)-based techniques. Some
of this work is already described in published papers [9, 15, 16, 17], and other work is accepted
for presentation at conferences in the coming months. In these papers we address some of
the difficulties in the different dimensions outlined above. We have also carried out proofs-
of-concept in final theses, trying to solve syntactic8 , metaphorical9 , semantic10 or dialogue
7
A sample questionnaire (in Spanish) in relation to short story 1 is available here: https://short.upm.es/argi7
8
https://oa.upm.es/72751/
9
https://oa.upm.es/71157/
10
https://oa.upm.es/75098/
formatting11 issues. For the time being, based on the work already carried out, we have observed
that techniques based on declarative methods are proving to be the most effective. The results,
which can be found in these published works, are apparently acceptable.
7. Conclusions and Further Research
After laying all this out, and provided the results are favourable, one of the expected conclusions
of this PhD thesis work would be considering it as an original contribution, since the task of
adaptation of literary texts into easy-to-read versions has not yet been addressed in Spanish.
For this reason this work plan can be ambitious. Thus, there will be a broad path to continue
in this research. As a further step, we would like to study particular impairments (not only
cognitive disabilities in general), in order to analyse whether a particular adaptation for each
disability is needed or not.
Additionally, it would be worthwhile to compile a corpus to apply other AI techniques such
as Machine Learning or Deep Learning in terms of, for instance, developing a language model
for text adaptation into easy-to-read versions.
On the other hand, the developed framework should be useful to help (a) different target
groups who present comprehension difficulties (e.g. people with cognitive disabilities, low
literacy skills or nonnative speakers) and (b) E2R professionals in terms of streamlining the task
of text adaptation.
In addition, this research work will help on (a) the development and fulfilment of the Sustain-
able Development Goals12 (SDGs) 4, 5 and 10 proposed by the UN, and (b) the recognition and
achievement of cognitive accessibility.
Acknowledgments
This work has been funded by the program PEJ-2020-AI/TIC-19542 supported by both Comu-
nidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) and Fondo Social Europeo. First, I would like to thank
my supervisor, Mari Carmen Suárez de Figueroa Baonza. Furthermore, we thank the different
institutions that are helping us to improve the daily life problems that people with reading
impairments present.
References
[1] K. Matausch, A. Nietzio, Easy-to-read and plain language: Defining criteria and refining
rules, 2012. URL: http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/easy-to-read/paper11.
[2] M. Nomura, G. S. Nielsen, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions,
Library Services to People with Special Needs Section, Guidelines for easy-to-read materials,
IFLA Headquarters, The Hague, 2010.
11
https://oa.upm.es/75513/
12
https://sdgs.un.org/goals
[3] AENOR, Lectura Fácil. Pautas y recomendaciones para la elaboración de documentos (UNE
153101:2018 EX), Asociación Española de Normalización, 2018.
[4] Inclusion Europe, Information for All. European standards for making information easy to
read and understand, Inclusion Europe, Brüssel, 2009. OCLC: 838005460.
[5] E. B. Union, Making information accessible for all, 2017. URL: https://www.euroblind.org/
publications-and-resources/making-information-accessible-all.
[6] M. Nikolajeva, Leer ficción es bueno para el desarrollo cognitivo, emocional y social, Alabe
Revista de Investigación sobre Lectura y Escritura (2019). doi:10.15645/Alabe2019.20.
12 .
[7] P. Freire, L. Slover, The importance of the act of reading, The Journal of Education 165
(1983) 5–11.
[8] M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, E. Ruckhaus, J. López-Guerrero, I. Cano, Álvaro Cervera, Towards
the Assessment of Easy-to-Read Guidelines Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques, in:
K. Miesenberger, R. Manduchi, M. C. Rodriguez, P. Peňáz (Eds.), Computers Helping People
with Special Needs. ICCHP 2020, volume 12376 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Springer, 2020, pp. 74–82.
[9] M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, I. Diab, E. Ruckhaus, I. Cano, First steps in the development of
a support application for easy-to-read adaptation, Universal Access in the Information
Society (2022). doi:10.1007/s10209- 022- 00946- z .
[10] H. Saggion, S. Stajner, S. Bott, S. Mille, L. Rello, B. Drndarevic, Making It Simplext: Imple-
mentation and Evaluation of a Text Simplification System for Spanish, ACM Transactions
on Accessible Computing 6 (2015).
[11] S. Bott, L. Rello, B. Drndarevic, H. Saggion, Can Spanish Be Simpler? LexSiS: Lexical
Simplification for Spanish, in: Proceedings of COLING 2012, The COLING 2012 Organizing
Committee, Mumbai, India, 2012, pp. 357–374.
[12] L. Rello, R. Baeza-Yates, H. Saggion, DysWebxia: Textos más Accesibles para Personas con
Dislexia, Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 51 (2013) 205–208.
[13] L. Moreno, R. Alarcón, P. Martínez, EASIER system. Language resources for cognitive
accessibility., in: The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and
Accessibility, ASSETS ’20, Association for Computing Machinery, Virtual Event, Greece,
2020, pp. 1–3.
[14] G. Barlacchi, S. Tonelli, Ernesta: A sentence simplification tool for children’s stories in
italian, 2013, pp. 476–487. doi:10.1007/978- 3- 642- 37256- 8_39 .
[15] M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, I. Diab, A. González, J. Rivero-Espinosa, First attempt to an
easy-to-read adaptation of repetitions in captions, in: Computers Helping People with
Special Needs: 18th International Conference, ICCHP-AAATE 2022, Lecco, Italy, July
11–15, 2022, Proceedings, Part I, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2022, p. 417–424.
doi:10.1007/978- 3- 031- 08648- 9_48 .
[16] M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, I. Diab, Á. González Sanz, J. Rivero-Espinosa, Automatic easy-
to-read translation of morphological structures in spanish texts, Procesamiento del
Lenguaje Natural 71 (2023) 191–203. URL: http://journal.sepln.org/sepln/ojs/ojs/index.
php/pln/article/view/6553.
[17] M. C. Suárez-Figueroa, I. Diab, Á. González, J. Rivero-Espinosa, Towards an automatic easy-
to-read adaptation of morphological features in spanish texts, in: J. Abdelnour Nocera,
M. Kristín Lárusdóttir, H. Petrie, A. Piccinno, M. Winckler (Eds.), Human-Computer
Interaction – INTERACT 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, 2023, pp. 176–198.