Erick Galani Maziero

Towards Brazilian Portuguese automatic text simplification systems

In this paper we investigate the main linguistic phenomena that can make texts complex and how they could be simplified. We focus on a corpus analysis of simple account texts available on the web for Brazilian Portuguese and propose simplification strategies for this language. This study illustrates the need for text simplification to facilitate accessibility to information by poor literacy readers and potentially by people with other cognitive disabilities. It also highlights characteristics of simplification for Portuguese, which may differ from other languages. Such study consists of the first step towards building Brazilian Portuguese text simplification systems. One of the scenarios in which these systems could be used is that of reading electronic texts produced, e.g., by the Brazilian government or by relevant news agencies.

Supporting the Adaptation of Texts for Poor Literacy Readers: a Text Simplification Editor for Brazilian Portuguese

In this paper we investigate the task of text simplification for Brazilian Portuguese. Our purpose is three-fold: to introduce a simplification tool for such language and its underlying development methodology, to present an on-line authoring system of simplified text based on the previous tool, and finally to discuss the potentialities of such technology for education. The resources and tools we present are new for Portuguese and innovative in many aspects with respect to previous initiatives for other languages.

A base de dados lexical e a interface web do TeP 2.0: thesaurus eletrônico para o Português do Brasil

In this paper, we describe the TeP 2.0 -- Electronic Thesaurus for Brazilian Portuguese -- which stores sets of synonym and antonym word forms. Specifically, we present the lexical database and the Web interface of TeP 2.0.

A corpus analysis of simple account texts and the proposal of simplification strategies: first steps towards text simplification systems

In this paper we investigate the main linguistic phenomena that can make texts complex and how they could be simplified. We focus on a corpus analysis of simple account texts available on the web for Brazilian Portuguese (BP). This study illustrates the need for text simplification to facilitate accessibility to information by poor readers and by people with cognitive disabilities. It also highlights features of simplification for BP, which may differ from other languages. Moreover, we propose simplification strategies and a Simplification Annotation Editor. This study consists of the first step towards building BP text simplification systems. One of the scenarios in which these systems could be used is that of reading electronic texts produced, e.g., by the Brazilian government or by news agencies.

Challenging choices for text simplification

In this paper we discuss particular choices we made during the development of a rule-based syntactic text simplification system. Such choices concern 1) how to deal with adverbial phrases in order to simplify sentences, and 2) the order in which to apply our set of simplification rules. Adverbial phrases have not been considered by previous work on text simplification, but have a considerable impact on the complexity of a sentence. Considering our whole set of simplification rules, we discuss and compare two different orders in which to apply them: empirical and hierarchical.

Revisiting Cross-document Structure Theory for multi-document discourse parsing

Multi-document discourse parsing aims to automatically identify the relations among textual spans from different texts on the same topic. Recently, with the growing amount of information and the emergence of new technologies that deal with many sources of information, more precise and efficient parsing techniques are required. The most relevant theory to multi-document relationship, Cross-document Structure Theory (CST), has been used for parsing purposes before, though the results had not been satisfactory. CST has received many critics because of its subjectivity, which may lead to low annotation agreement and, consequently, to poor parsing performance. In this work, we propose a refinement of the original CST, which consists in (i) formalizing the relationship definitions, (ii) pruning and combining some relations based on their meaning, and (iii) organizing the relations in a hierarchical structure. The hypothesis for this refinement is that it will lead to better agreement in the annotation and consequently to better parsing results. For this aim, it was built an annotated corpus according to this refinement and it was observed an improvement in the annotation agreement. Based on this corpus, a parser was developed using machine learning techniques and hand-crafted rules. Specifically, hierarchical techniques were used to capture the hierarchical organization of the relations according to the proposed refinement of CST. These two approaches were used to identify the relations among texts spans and to generate multi-document annotation structure. Results outperformed other CST parsers, showing the adequacy of the proposed refinement in the theory.

Adaptation of Discourse Parsing Models for the Portuguese Language

Discourse parsing in Portuguese has two critical limitations. The first is that the task has been explored using only symbolic approaches, i.e., Using manually extracted lexical patterns. The second is related to the domain of the lexical patterns, which were extracted through the analysis of a corpus of academic texts, generating many domain-specific patterns. For English, many approaches have been explored using machine learning with features based on a prominent lexicon-syntax notion of dominance sets. In this paper, two works were adapted to Portuguese, improving the results, outperforming the baselines and previous works for Portuguese, considering the task of rhetorical relation identification.