Carroll, J., G. Minnen, Y. Canning, S. Devlin and J. Tait (1998) `Practical simplification of English newspaper text to assist aphasic readers'. In Proceedings of the AAAI-98 Workshop on Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technology, Madison, Wisconsin. 7-10.
Aphasia is a disability of language processing often suffered by people as a result of a stroke or head injury. In order to assist aphasic readers we are developing a system which automatically simplifies English newspaper texts as available on the Internet. The system combines state-of-the-art natural language processing tools with innovative research on text simplification. We present the architecture of the system, discuss the analysis of newspaper text and a number of criteria for simplification. In addition, we provide some initial implementation details and propose an evaluation method.
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