Automatic Easy-to-Read Translation of Morphological Structures in Spanish Texts

Resumen

The Easy-to-Read (E2R) Methodology was created to improve the daily life of people with cognitive disabilities. This methodology aims to present clear and easily understood documents by means of providing a set of guidelines related to the writing and layout of texts. Some of these guidelines focus on morphological aspects that may cause difficulties in reading comprehension. Examples of those guidelines are: (a) to avoid the use of adverbs ending in -mente (-ly in English), and (b) to avoid the use of superlative forms. Currently, the E2R guidelines are applied manually to create easy-to-read text materials. To help in such a manual process, our research line is focused on applying the E2R Methodology in an automatic fashion to improve cognitive accessibility. Specifically, in this paper we present (a) the inclusive design approach for the development of E2R translation methods for avoiding both adverbs ending in -mente and superlative forms, and (b) the initial rule-based methods for adapting those linguistic structures into an Easy-to-Read form