Abstract
Leichte Sprache (LS; easy-to-read German) defines a variety of German characterized by simplified syntactic constructions and a small vocabulary. It provides barrier-free information for a wide spectrum of people with cognitive impairments, learning difficulties, and/or a low level of literacy in the German language. The levels of difficulty of a range of syntactic constructions were systematically evaluated with LS readers as part of the recent LeiSA project (Bock, 2019). That study identified a number of constructions that were evaluated as being easy to comprehend but which fell beyond the definition of LS. We therefore want to broaden the scope of LS to include further constructions that LS readers can easily manage and that they might find useful for putting their thoughts into words. For constructions not considered in the LeiSA study, we performed a comparative treebank study of constructions attested to in a collection of 245 LS documents from a variety of sources. Employing the treebanks TüBa-D/S (also called VERBMOBIL) and TüBa-D/Z, we compared the frequency of such constructions in those texts with their incidence in spoken and written German sources produced without the explicit goal of facilitating comprehensibility. The resulting extension is called Extended Leichte Sprache (ELS). To date, text in LS has generally been produced by authors proficient in standard German. In order to enable text production by LS readers themselves, we developed a computational linguistic system, dubbed ExtendedEasyTalk. This system supports LS readers in formulating grammatically correct and semantically coherent texts covering constructions in ELS. This paper outlines the principal components: (1) a natural-language paraphrase generator that supports fast and correct text production while taking readership-design aspects into account, and (2) explicit coherence specifications based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to express the communicative function of sentences. The system’s writing-workshop mode controls the options in (1) and (2). Mandatory questions generated by the system aim to teach the user when and how to consider audience-design concepts. Accordingly, users are trained in text production in a similar way to elementary school students, who also tend to omit audience-design cues. Importantly, we illustrate in this paper how to make the dialogues of these components intuitive and easy to use to avoid overtaxing the user. We also report the results of our evaluation of the software with different user groups.
Highlights
Leichte Sprache (LS) is a simplified variety of German
This leads to a research question concerning the target grammar of our system: What constructions might LS readers like to use in a writing tool? In order to obtain quantitative estimates of the incidence of the constructions evaluated in the LeiSA study, we built a parsed corpus of 245 published LS documents
We outline the comparative corpus study into constructions LS readers are likely to use in communication. (Readers wishing to skip the detailed linguistic argumentations can go directly to Table 8, which provides a list of the constructions included in Extended Leichte Sprache (ELS).) In Section 3, we present ExtendedEasyTalk as follows: First, we summarize the state-of-theart technical writing support in the research area of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC); a particular highlight of the descriptions is automatic natural-language generation (NLG)
Summary
Leichte Sprache (LS) is a simplified variety of German. It was developed as part of the plain language movement of the 2000s (cf. easy-to-read English), which aimed to produce easy-tounderstand texts for people with intellectual disabilities or learning difficulties (Bredel and Maaß, 2016, p. 60), who often have low literacy skills (Light et al, 2019). This technique is comparable to sentence-combining exercises in the Anglo-Saxon language area that teaches students to integrate sets of short, disconnected sentences to form longer, more effective ones (see Nordquist (2018) for an online introduction, Ney (1980) for the history, and Saddler and Preschern (2007) for the school context) This leads to two research questions concerning assisted writing: What individual support can help a range of users with intellectual disabilities, learning difficulties, and/or low literacy skills to write understandable, coherent text in ELS?
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