Abstract:

The main aim of this paper is developing and evaluating a tool that is able to transform educational texts in natural language to a very easy reading for people with problems in comprehension, for instance, deaf people or people learning the language. Besides, the tool will be used in the University context in order to help students with this kind of problems. The transformation process implies automatically detection of linguistic features of an input text and reducing/eliminating this obstacles but preserving the original meaning of the text. The Human Language Technologies will be applied for this aim and some of the possible transformations and supports will be: 1)recognizing name entities providing extra information for them, for example, related images, information from SimpleWikipedia or synonyms, 2) recognizing and resolving temporal expressions in the text giving also a chronological line of the events in texts, 3) simplifying complex sentences dividing them in simpler ones. The tool will be evaluated by students of the University.

Keywords:

Human language technologies, educational texts, reading comprehension.