Automatic Text Simplification for People with Cognitive Disabilities: Resource Creation within the C lear T ext Project (2023)

Abstract: This paper presents the ongoing work conducted within the ClearText project, specifically focusing on the resource creation for the simplification of Spanish for people with cognitive disabilities. These resources include the CLEARSIM corpus and the Simple.Text tool. On the one hand, a description of the corpus compilation process with the help of APSA is detailed along with information regarding whether these texts are bronze, silver or gold standard simplification versions from the original text. The goal to reach is 18,000 texts in total by the end of the project. On the other hand, we aim to explore Large Language Models (LLMs) in a sequence-to-sequence setup for text simplification at the document level. Therefore, the tool’s objectives, technical aspects, and the preliminary results derived from early experimentation are also presented. The initial results are subject to improvement, given that experimentation is in a very preliminary stage. Despite showcasing flaws inherent to generative models (e.g. hallucinations, repetitive text), we examine the resolutions (or lack thereof) of complex linguistic phenomena that can be learned from the corpus. These issues will be addressed throughout the remainder of this project. The expected positive results from this project that will impact society are three-fold in nature: scientific-technical, social, and economic.

## introduction people with cognitive disabilities have significant limitations in their intellectual functioning and/or may also lack the ability to adapt to everyday situations. in fact, they have spoken and written word comprehension deficits that may include misinterpretation of literal meanings and difficulty understanding complex instructions, to name a few. among the different language phenomena they struggle with, there are idioms, figures of speech, abstractions, uncommon words, lack of precision, and complex syntax, among other aspects. currently, natural language processing (nlp) technologies are developed and mature enough to provide a sound basis for (1) developing components to automatically detect and remove obstacles to reading comprehension and (2) generate additional content to facilitate reading comprehension. thus, we begin this project with the main hypothesis that the research, development, and deployment of nlp technology can support the authoring of accessible content in spanish for people with cognitive disabilities with the aim of increasing both their inclusion and empowerment in europe. with this hypothesis in mind, the cleartext project foot_0 , funded by the spanish government and the european union (grant reference ted2021-130707b-i00) and developed by the gplsi research group foot_1 of the university of alicante, focuses on researching, implementing, deploying, evaluating, and ultimately providing robust technologies for nlp to support the authoring of accessible spanish content for public sector organisations -at local, regional, and national levelsthat is intelligible to people with cognitive disabilities, thereby widening their inclusion and empowerment in europe. this, in turn, will improve the ability to access written information for everyone, thereby reducing the risk of exclusion for those with cognitive disabilities. the project is expected to positively impact the quality of life of people with cognitive disabilities, by facilitating their access to educational, vocational, cultural, and social opportunities in public sector organisations. this paper is structured as follows: section 2 includes a literature review covering automatic text simplification and focusing on related work tackling corpora and tools; section 3 presents the scientific and technological objectives of the project; section 4 delves into the composition of the project's members; section 5 describes the different resources created in this project, namely the clearsim corpus and the simple.text tool; section 6 details the expected scientific-technical and socio-economic impact of this project, while section 7 concludes with the future work ahead. automatic text simplification (henceforth ats) can be defined as "the process of reducing the linguistic complexity of a text to improve its understandability and readability, while still maintaining its original information content and meaning" (al-thanyyan and azmi, 2022). ats can be achieved by following different approaches, namely rule-based, data-driven, or hybrid approaches, and by simplifying some or all language levels (i.e. lexical, syntactic, semantic, and stylistic). the more language levels and language phenomena tackled in the simplification, the more refined the simplified text will be. specific domains are also an aspect to take into account when simplifying texts. the audience for which these simplifications are created is diverse (e.g. children, non-native speakers, poor readers, and cognitively impaired individuals) although it is sometimes left unspecified. hence, the importance of the current focus on customisation, as a given simplification solution may not work for all audiences @xcite . sections 2.1 and 2.2 cover a brief review of the main corpora and tools for ats in spanish in more detail. ## scientific and technological objectives the main objective of the cleartext project can be divided into the following specific objectives: ## human resources a multidisciplinary research team consisting of five computer science experts and three linguists, with seven of them holding doctorate degrees and one serving as a technician, is in charge of the project. all members belong to the gplsi research group. the composition of the team reflects a slight positive gender imbalance with five women and three men. the team has extensive experience in technological research and development in nlp, spanning more than 30 years, and, more specifically, in relation to the requested project in word sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, coreference, named entity, lexical and syntactic analysis, text summarisation and text simplification. ## tool and corpus: work in progress we are currently contemplating and developing both a traditional or conventional approach and also one with the training of a language model. for both of them, this project's aim includes the creation of two resources: (1) the clearsim corpus of simplified texts in spanish and (2) the simple.text tool. ## expected future impact the expected positive results from this project that will impact society are three-fold in nature: (1) scientific-technical, (2) social, and (3) economic. ## conclusion and future work as a preliminary conclusion, we are currently developing a simplification system in spanish for people with cognitive disabilities. we are collaborating with apsa, an ngo comprising a group of experts in text simplification, in the creation of a corpus of simplified texts in spanish. the outcomes of our project will not only contribute to the development of resources for public administration but also facilitate the simplification process for our collaborator, by enabling automated workflows, thereby eliminating the need for manual simplification in the first stage of the simplification-validation process. the resources created by this project will be available on huggingface 12 and the group's github 13 . future work is planned in several directions. on the one hand, by improving the corpus. this can be done by increasing its size, the domains as well as the universe of linguistic phenomena covered in it. this may benefit the development of data-driven solutions for ats at the document level. also, more research is needed to either validate or reject our hypothesis. building an automatic document-level text simplification system based on large language models appears to be a challenging task given the scarce number of antecedents. besides the corpus, other strategies need to be explored such as pre-training the model for specific simplification operations or reinforcement learning from human feedback. on the other hand, concerning the tool, a more advanced user interface needs to be developed so as to provide the user with automatic-tofine-grained control of the simplification process. for instance, allowing the user to adjust the level of simplification. additionally, the tool also needs to comply with accessibility recommendations.