CALL FOR PAPERS

NAACL HLT 2012 Workshop
Predicting and improving text readability for target reader populations (PITR2012)
June 7, 2012
Web: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/nlg/PITR2012/

Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations Workshop will be be held in conjunction with the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT) 2012 conference,4 - 8 June, 2012, at Le Centre Sheraton Montréal 1201, boul. René-Lévesque ouest, Montréal, (Québec), Canada, H3B-2L7.

This workshop is an activity of the new ACL Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SIG-SLPAT): http://sigslpat.csee.ogi.edu/.


DESCRIPTION

How readable is the output of systems that generate or reformulate language? What makes language easy or difficult to read for different types of readers? How can existing text be reformulated to improve information access?

The last few years have seen a resurgence of work on text simplification and readability. Examples include learning lexical and syntactic simplification operations from Simple English Wikipedia revision histories (e.g., Zhu et al. 2010, Woodsend and Lapata 2011, Biran et al. 2011), exploring complex lexico-syntactic simplification requiring morphological changes as well as constituent reordering (Siddharthan 2010, 2011), simplifying mathematical form (Power and Williams, 2012), applications to second language learners (Peterson 2007) and low literacy adults (e.g., Gasperin et al. 2010), attempts to measure linguistic quality (Pitler et al. 2010, Nenkova et al. 2010), analyses of the use of text modification for deaf students (e.g., O'Neill 2005), and NLG research on summarising technical data for lay people (e.g., Mahamood and Reiter 2011).

This will be a cross-disciplinary workshop bringing together researchers in computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and education with an interest in text reformulation, generation of texts at different levels of difficulty, and readability measures. We solicit papers on reformulation (text-to-text), generation of readable language from data (data-to-text), user evaluations of language simplification strategies, and studies on the readability of text. We would like contributions on how to simplify:

Lexis and Syntax
Numerical quantities and logical relations
Discourse Properties (making text more transparent, etc.)

We are particularly interested in research aimed at assessing the readability of machine-generated text, simplifying texts, and assessing the accessibility of texts for specific target readers such as:

Adults with poor literacy
2nd language learners
People with language deficits (Aphasia, Deafness, Neurodegeneration, etc.)
Lay readers accessing technical material


IMPORTANT DATES

Mar 25, 2012: Deadline for papers
Apr 24, 2012: Notification of acceptance
May 4, 2012: Camera-ready deadline
Jun 7, 2012: Workshop date


SUBMISSION DETAILS

Authors should submit papers between 2 and 8 pages in length (excluding references) in ACL style and state their presentation preferences (oral or poster) on the submission form (a link will be available soon).


ORGANISERS

Sandra Williams, The Open University, UK.
Advaith Siddharthan, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA.


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Gregory Aist, Iowa State University, USA.
John Carroll, University of Sussex, UK.
Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Microsoft Research (Redmond), USA.
Siobhan Devlin, University of Sunderland, UK.
Noémie Elhadad, Columbia University, USA.
Micha Elsner, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Richard Evans, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Lijun Feng, Columbia University, USA.
Caroline Gasperin, TouchType Ltd., UK.
Albert Gatt, University of Malta, Malta.
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany.
Raquel Hervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Véronique Hoste, University College Ghent, Belgium.
Matt Huenerfauth, The City University of New York (CUNY), USA.
Iustina Ilisei, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Tapas Kanungo, Microsoft, USA.
Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Ruslan Mitkov, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Hitoshi Nishikawa, NTT, Japan.
Mari Ostendorf, University of Washington, USA.
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Lucia Specia, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Irina Temnikova, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Ielka van der Sluis, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.