Evelina Rennes


2020

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Is it simpler? An Evaluation of an Aligned Corpus of Standard-Simple Sentences
Evelina Rennes
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)

Parallel monolingual resources are imperative for data-driven sentence simplification research. We present the work of aligning, at the sentence level, a corpus of all Swedish public authorities and municipalities web texts in standard and simple Swedish. We compare the performance of three alignment algorithms used for similar work in English (Average Alignment, Maximum Alignment, and Hungarian Alignment), and the best-performing algorithm is used to create a resource of 15,433 unique sentence pairs. We evaluate the resulting corpus using a set of features that has proven to predict text complexity of Swedish texts. The results show that the sentences of the simple sub-corpus are indeed less complex than the sentences of the standard part of the corpus, according to many of the text complexity measures.

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Visualizing Facets of Text Complexity across Registers
Marina Santini | Arne Jonsson | Evelina Rennes
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)

In this paper, we propose visualizing results of a corpus-based study on text complexity using radar charts. We argue that the added value of this type of visualisation is the polygonal shape that provides an intuitive grasp of text complexity similarities across the registers of a corpus. The results that we visualize come from a study where we explored whether it is possible to automatically single out different facets of text complexity across the registers of a Swedish corpus. To this end, we used factor analysis as applied in Biber’s Multi-Dimensional Analysis framework. The visualization of text complexity facets with radar charts indicates that there is correspondence between linguistic similarity and similarity of shape across registers.