Article

ERNESTA: a sentence simplification tool for children's stories in italian

Authors:

Gianni Barlacchi,

Sara TonelliAuthors Info & Claims

CICLing'13: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 2

Pages 476 - 487

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_39

Published: 24 March 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We present ERNESTA (Enhanced Readability through a Novel Event-based Simplification Tool), the first sentence simplification system for Italian, specifically developed to improve the comprehension of factual events in stories for children with low reading skills. The system performs two basic actions: First, it analyzes a text by resolving anaphoras (including null pronouns), so as to make all implicit information explicit. Then, it simplifies the story sentence by sentence at syntactic level, by producing simple statements in the present tense on the factual events described in the story. Our simplification strategy is driven by psycholinguistic principles and targets children aged 7 - 11 with text comprehension difficulties. The evaluation shows that our approach achieves promising results. Furthermore, ERNESTA could be exploited in different tasks, for instance in the generation of educational games and reading comprehension tests.

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Cited By

Diab ISuárez-Figueroa MPeris R(2024)Towards an Automatic Easy-to-Read Adaptation of Dialogues in Narrative Texts in SpanishComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62849-8_26(208-216)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62849-8_26
Saggion HŠtajner SBott SMille SRello LDrndarevic B(2015)Making It SimplextACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/27380466:4(1-36)Online publication date: 11-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2738046

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image Guide Proceedings

CICLing'13: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing - Volume 2

March 2013

571 pages

ISBN:9783642372551

Editor:
Alexander Gelbukh
Center for Computing Research, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico D.F., Mexico

Sponsors

University of the Aegean: University of the Aegean
IPN: Instituto Politécnico Nacional
Natural Language and Text Processing Lab., CIC-IPN: Natural Language and Text Processing Laboratory, CIC-IPN

Publisher

Springer-Verlag

Berlin, Heidelberg

Publication History

Published: 24 March 2013

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Cited By

Diab ISuárez-Figueroa MPeris R(2024)Towards an Automatic Easy-to-Read Adaptation of Dialogues in Narrative Texts in SpanishComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62849-8_26(208-216)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62849-8_26
Saggion HŠtajner SBott SMille SRello LDrndarevic B(2015)Making It SimplextACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/27380466:4(1-36)Online publication date: 11-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2738046

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