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<Paper uid="W03-1602">
  <Title>Text Simplification for Reading Assistance: A Project Note</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> This paper reported on the present results of our ongoing research on text simplification for reading assistance targeting congenitally deaf people. We raised four interrelated issues that we needed address to realize this application and presented our previous activities focuing on three of them: readability assessment, paraphrase representation and post-transfer error detection.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Regarding readability assessment, we proposed a novel approach in which we conducted questionnaire surveys to collect readability assessment data and took a corpus-based empirical method to obtain a readability ranking model. The results of the surveys show the potential impact of text simplification on reading assistance. We conducted experiments on the task of comparing the readability of a given paraphrase pair and obtained promising results by SVM-based classifier induction (95% precision with 89% recall). Our approach should be equally applicable to other population segments such as aphasic readers and second-language learners. Our next steps includes the investigation of the drawbacks of the present bag-of-features modeling approach. We also need to consider a method to introduce the notion of user classes (e.g. beginner, intermediate and advanced). Textual aspects of readability will also need to be considered, as discussed in (Inui and Nogami, 2001; Siddahrthan, 2003).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Regarding paraphrase representation, we presented our revision-based lexico-structural paraphrasing engine. It provides a fully expressible scheme for representating paraphrases, while preserving the easiness of handcraft paraphrasing rules by providing an extended natural language as a means of pattern editting. We have handcrafted over a thousand transfer rules that implement a broad range of lexical and structural paraphrasing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The problem of error detection is also critical.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> When we find a effective solution to it, we will be ready to integrate the technologies into an application system of text simplification and conduct userand task-oriented evaluations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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