United States

The prediction of lexical complexity in context is assuming an increasing relevance in Natural Language Processing research, since iden- tifying complex words is often the first step of text simplification pipelines. To the best of our knowledge, though, datasets annotated with complex words are available only for English and for a limited number of Western languages. In our paper, we introduce CompLex-ZH, a dataset including words annotated with complexity scores in sentential contexts for Chinese. Our data include sentences in Mandarin and Cantonese, which were selected from a variety of sources and textual genres. We provide a first evaluation with baselines combining hand- crafted and language models-based features.

EMNLP 2024

CompLex-ZH: A New Dataset for Lexical Complexity Prediction in Mandarin and Cantonese

lexical complexity

word embeddings

text simplification

chinese

language models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
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The University of Texas at Austin 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Explanatory images play a pivotal role in accessible and easy-to-read (E2R) texts. However, the images available in online databases are not tailored toward the respective texts, and the creation of customized images is expensive. In this large-scale study, we investigated whether text-to-image generation models can close this gap by providing customizable images quickly and easily. We benchmarked seven, four open- and three closed-source, image generation models and provide an extensive evaluation of the resulting images. In addition, we performed a user study with people from the E2R target group to examine whether the images met their requirements. We find that some of the models show remarkable performance, but none of the models are ready to be used at a larger scale without human supervision. Our research is an important step toward facilitating the creation of accessible information for E2R creators and tailoring accessible images to the target group's needs.

Images Speak Volumes: User-Centric Assessment of Image Generation for Accessible Communication

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in other domains has raised the question of whether LLMs can reliably assess and manipulate the readability of text. We approach this question empirically. First, using a published corpus of 4,724 English text excerpts, we find that readability estimates produced “zero- shot” from GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o mini exhibit relatively high correlation with human judgments (r = 0.76 and r = 0.74, respec- tively), outperforming estimates derived from traditional readability formulas and various psycholinguistic indices. Then, in a pre-registered human experiment (N = 59), we ask whether Turbo can reliably make text easier or harder to read. We find evidence to support this hypothesis, though considerable variance in human judgments remains unexplained. We conclude by discussing the limitations of this approach, including limited scope, as well as the validity of the “readability” construct and its depen- dence on context, audience, and goal.

Measuring and Modifying the Readability of English Texts with GPT-4

The most reliable and up-to-date information on health questions is in the biomedical literature, but inaccessible due to the complex language full of jargon. Domain specific scientific text simplification holds the promise to make this literature accessible to a lay audience. Therefore, we create Cochrane-auto: a large corpus of pairs of aligned sentences, paragraphs, and abstracts from biomedical abstracts and lay summaries. Experiments demonstrate that a plan-guided simplification system trained on Cochrane-auto is able to outperform a strong baseline trained on unaligned abstracts and lay summaries. More generally, our freely available corpus complementing Newsela-auto and Wiki-auto facilitates text simplification research beyond the sentence-level and direct lexical and grammatical revisions.

Cochrane-auto: An Aligned Dataset for the Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts

Research into automatic text simplification aims to promote access to information for all members of society. To facilitate generalizability, simplification research often abstracts away from specific use cases, and targets a prototypical reader and an underspecified content creator. In this paper, we consider a real-world use case -- simplification technology for use in Dutch municipalities -- and identify the needs of the content creators and the target audiences in this scenario. The stakeholders envision a system that (a) assists the human writer without taking over the task; (b) provides diverse outputs, tailored for specific target audiences; and (c) explains the suggestions that it outputs. These requirements call for technology that is characterized by modularity, explainability, and variability. We argue that these are important research directions that require further exploration.

Considering Human Interaction and Variability in Automatic Text Simplification

Biomedical literature is often written in highly specialized language, posing significant comprehension challenges for non-experts. Automatic text simplification (ATS) offers a solution by making such texts more accessible while preserving critical information. However, evaluating ATS for biomedical texts is still challenging due to the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. General-domain metrics like SARI, BLEU, and ROUGE focus on surface-level text features, and readability metrics like FKGL and ARI fail to account for domain-specific terminology or assess how well the simplified text conveys core meanings (gist). To address this, we introduce SciGisPy, a novel evaluation metric inspired by Gist Inference Score (GIS) from Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT). SciGisPy measures how well a simplified text facilitates the formation of abstract inferences (gist) necessary for comprehension, especially in the biomedical domain. We revise GIS for this purpose by introducing domain-specific enhancements, including semantic chunking, Information Content (IC) theory, and specialized embeddings, while removing unsuitable indexes. Our experimental evaluation on the Cochrane biomedical text simplification dataset demonstrates that SciGisPy outperforms the original GIS formulation, with a significant increase in correctly identified simplified texts (84% versus 44.8%). The results and a thorough ablation study confirm that SciGisPy better captures the essential meaning of biomedical content, outperforming existing approaches.

SciGisPy: a Novel Metric for Biomedical Text Simplification via Gist Inference Score

This research focuses on evaluating the simplification of Brazilian legal rulings using large language models (LLMs). The main question addressed by the study is whether large language models can automatically simplify Brazilian legal texts. Most simplification methods are validated by comparing them to human-made simplifications. However, such resources are limited for Brazilian Portuguese, particularly in the legal domain, making this task both challenging and significant for advancing language technologies in this field. The findings show that the models are capable of simplifying legal sentences, but there is a trade-off. While both models reduce the complexity of the language used, they also decrease the semantic similarity with the original text, highlighting the challenge of simplifying text while maintaining its core meaning.

Evaluating the Simplification of Brazilian Legal Rulings in LLMs Using Readability Scores as a Target

Medical text simplification is crucial for making complex biomedical literature more accessible to non-experts. Traditional methods struggle with the specialized terms and jargon of medical texts, lacking the flexibility to adapt the simplification process dynamically. In contrast, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present unique opportunities by offering enhanced control over text simplification through iterative refinement and collaboration between specialized agents. In this work, we introduce the Society of Medical Simplifiers, a novel LLM-based framework inspired by the "Society of Mind" (SOM) philosophy. Our approach leverages the strengths of LLMs by assigning five distinct roles, i.e., Layperson, Simplifier, Medical Expert, Language Clarifier, and Redundancy Checker, organized into interaction loops. This structure allows the agents to progressively improve text simplification while maintaining the complexity and accuracy of the original content. Evaluations on the Cochrane text simplification dataset demonstrate that our framework is on par with or outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior readability and content preservation through controlled simplification processes.

Society of Medical Simplifiers

The tasks of lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complex word identification (CWI) commonly presuppose that difficult to understand words are shared by the target population. Meanwhile, personalization methods have also been proposed to adapt models to individual needs. We verify that a recent Japanese LCP dataset is representative of its target population by partially replicating the annotation. By another reannotation we show that native Chinese speakers perceive the complexity differently due to Sino-Japanese vocabulary. To explore the possibilities of personalization, we compare competitive baselines trained on the group mean ratings and individual ratings in terms of performance for an individual. We show that the model trained on a group mean performs similarly to an individual model in the CWI task, while achieving good LCP performance for an individual is difficult. We also experiment with adapting a finetuned BERT model, which results only in marginal improvements across all settings.

Difficult for Whom? A Study of Japanese Lexical Complexity

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown promising results in traditional downstream tasks. The capability of VLMs to ``think'' from a first-person perspective, a crucial attribute for advancing autonomous agents and robotics, remains largely unexplored. To bridge this research gap, we introduce EgoThink, a novel visual question-answering benchmark that encompasses six core capabilities with twelve detailed dimensions. The benchmark is constructed using selected clips from egocentric videos, with manually annotated question-answer pairs containing first-person information. To comprehensively assess VLMs, we evaluate twenty-one popular VLMs on EgoThink. Moreover, given the open-ended format of the answers, we use GPT-4 as the automatic judge to compute single-answer grading. Experimental results indicate that although GPT-4V leads in numerous dimensions, all evaluated VLMs still possess considerable potential for improvement in first-person perspective tasks.

EgoThink: Evaluating First-Person Perspective Thinking Capability of Vision-Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) for Bangla text summarization condense texts while pre serving key information by leveraging ad vanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. In this study, we used two popular Bangla news summarization datasets through the evaluation of 5 LLMs as well as human evaluation. we made two key observations. First, we found that GPT-4 with zero-shot model settings performs well in Bangla news summarization. Secondly, previous research has been constrained by low-quality references, resulting in an underestimation of human per formance and diminished few-shot capabilities. To more accurately evaluate LLMs, we per formed human assessments using high-quality summaries created by student writers. De spite notable stylistic differences, including the extent of paraphrasing, LLM-generated sum maries were found to be comparable to those written by humans. Our model was assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively, and com parisons with other published results showed significant improvements in human evaluation scores due to the LLM techniques.

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