I will soon present part of my AI-Driven Web Text Simplification research.

My talk:

• is “Creating Simple Web Text for People with ID to Train AI;”
• will be at the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, the largest such conference in the world; and
• will focus on a pilot study my partners and I recently completed.

We tested if people with intellectual disabilities understand Web text simplified with plain-language standards. (Spoiler: They do!)

We are operationalizing plain-language standards essentially to develop:

• a reliable, easy-to-use method for human editors to create simple text; and
• algorithms for AI to recognize and to create simple text.

 

 

 

 

For my AI-Driven Web Text Simplification research, I lead a coalition of corporate and academic partners. They include:

• 
  • IBM Accessibility Research Group
  • Watson Group
• 
  • Amazon Machine Learning Research Awards
• 
  • INDEX Program, Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center
  • University of Massachusetts Medical School
• 
  • Artificial Intelligence Lab
  • University of Massachusetts Boston
• 
  • User Experience and Decision Making Lab
  • Worcester Polytechnic University

Research Goal

Make Web text so simple people understand it the first time they read it.

Background

Text comprises the vast majority of Web content. Poor reading comprehension presents significant challenges to many populations, including people with cognitive disabilities, non‐native speakers, and people with low literacy.

Text simplification aims to reduce text complexity while retaining its meaning. Manual text simplification research has been ongoing for decades. Yet no significant effort has been made to automate text simplification except as a preprocessor for natural-language processing tasks such as machine translation and summarization.

Short-Term Approach

In the short term, my partners and I are improving manual text simplification by creating effective, replicable methods for humans to produce it. We use national and international plain language standards. We conduct pilot studies to see if people comprehend our human-curated, simplified Web text better than typical Web text.

Long-Term Approach

In the long term, my partners and I are developing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to produce simple Web text on a mass scale. We are training AI with enormous sets of aligned sentence pairs (typical/simple). We will soon start crowd-sourcing the generation of training data.

I will provide details in future blog posts.