Seminar: "Textual Complexity is in the Eye of the Beholder"
Abstract
The difficulty of a text is highly subjective, yet this factor is often neglected in text simplification and readability systems which use a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In this talk, I will discuss what contributes to text complexity, emphasising how this is dependent on the intended audience. Furthermore, I will present work showing how active learning can be used to create bespoke complexity models for individual readers.
Invited Speaker: Sian Gooding
Short Bio: Sian Gooding is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory within the Natural Language and Information Processing group and a visiting researcher at the Language, Computation and Cognition Lab. Her research focuses on readability and text simplification – the study of how to automatically adapt text to suit the needs of different audiences.
Fernando Alva-Manchego
Lecturer
My research interests include text adaptation, evaluation of natural language generation, and NLP for education.