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ERNESTA: A Sentence Simplification Tool for Children’s Stories in Italian

  • Conference paper
Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICLing 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7817))

Abstract

We present ERNESTA (Enhanced Readability through a Novel Event-based Simplification Tool), the first sentence simplification system for Italian, specifically developed to improve the comprehension of factual events in stories for children with low reading skills. The system performs two basic actions: First, it analyzes a text by resolving anaphoras (including null pronouns), so as to make all implicit information explicit. Then, it simplifies the story sentence by sentence at syntactic level, by producing simple statements in the present tense on the factual events described in the story. Our simplification strategy is driven by psycholinguistic principles and targets children aged 7 - 11 with text comprehension difficulties. The evaluation shows that our approach achieves promising results. Furthermore, ERNESTA could be exploited in different tasks, for instance in the generation of educational games and reading comprehension tests.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Engineering Department, Università di Siena, Italy

    Gianni Barlacchi

  2. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Via Sommarive 18, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Sara Tonelli

Authors
  1. Gianni Barlacchi
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  2. Sara Tonelli
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Computing Research, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico D.F., Mexico

    Alexander Gelbukh

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Barlacchi, G., Tonelli, S. (2013). ERNESTA: A Sentence Simplification Tool for Children’s Stories in Italian. In: Gelbukh, A. (eds) Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. CICLing 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7817. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37256-8_39

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37255-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37256-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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