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.

Date
Jun 9, 2022 13:00 — 14:00
Location
Abacws and Online

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
Fernando Alva-Manchego
Lecturer

My research interests include text adaptation, evaluation of natural language generation, and NLP for education.