Text Simplification (TS) aims to make texts more accessible to various readers by reducing reading time and/or by facilitating understanding and access to the relevant information. In this study, we address two topics which are important for TS but have not received much attention so far. First, we explore which types of syntactic simplification transformations make troubleshooting in IT domain easier for both native and non-native English speakers. Second, we explore how the choice of TS evaluation strategy influences final results. Our experiments show that grammaticality of a sentence influences the perceived simplicity by native and by non-native speakers differently. We also find that a high inter-annotator agreement can be achieved only in the case of the relative assessment of the sentence pairs in which one sentence is significantly simpler than the other one.
@InProceedings{ŠTAJNER18.3, author = {Sanja Štajner}, title = {How to Make Troubleshooting Simpler? Assessing Differences in Perceived Sentence Simplicity by Native and Non-native Speakers}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Ineke Schuurman and Leen Sevens and Victoria Yaneva and John O’Flaherty}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-12-2}, language = {english} }
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