Digital Comprehensibility Assessment of Simplified Texts among Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Text simplification refers to the process of increasing the comprehensibility of texts. Automatic text simplification models are most commonly evaluated by experts or crowdworkers instead of the primary target groups of simplified texts, such as persons with intellectual disabilities. We conducted a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2024-02
Main Authors: Säuberli, Andreas, Holzknecht, Franz, Haller, Patrick, Deilen, Silvana, Schiffl, Laura, Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Ebling, Sarah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Disabilities
Evaluation
Questions
Simplification
Tablet computers
Texts
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Text simplification refers to the process of increasing the comprehensibility of texts. Automatic text simplification models are most commonly evaluated by experts or crowdworkers instead of the primary target groups of simplified texts, such as persons with intellectual disabilities. We conducted an evaluation study of text comprehensibility including participants with and without intellectual disabilities reading unsimplified, automatically and manually simplified German texts on a tablet computer. We explored four different approaches to measuring comprehensibility: multiple-choice comprehension questions, perceived difficulty ratings, response time, and reading speed. The results revealed significant variations in these measurements, depending on the reader group and whether the text had undergone automatic or manual simplification. For the target group of persons with intellectual disabilities, comprehension questions emerged as the most reliable measure, while analyzing reading speed provided valuable insights into participants' reading behavior.
ISSN:2331-8422