Towards the assessment of easy-to-read guidelines using artificial intelligence techniques

Abstract

The Easy-to-Read (E2R) Methodology was created to improve the daily life of people with cognitive disabilities, who have difficulties in reading comprehension. The main goal of the E2R Methodology is to present clear and easily understood documents. This methodology includes a set of guidelines and recommendations that affect the writing of texts, the supporting images, the design and layout of documents, and the final editing format. Such guidelines are used in the manual processes of (a) adapting existing documents and (b) producing new materials. The process of adapting existing documents is cyclic and implies three activities: analysis, transformation, and validation. All these activities are human resource consuming, due to the need of involving people with cognitive disabilities as well as E2R experts. In order to alleviate such processes, we are currently investigating the development of methods, based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, to perform the analysis and transformation of documents in a (semi)-automatic fashion. In this paper we present our AI-based method for assessing a particular document with respect to the E2R guidelines as well as an initial implementation of such a method; our research on the transformation of documents is out of the scope of this paper. We carried out a comparative evaluation of the results obtained by our initial implementation against the results of the document analysis performed by people with cognitive disabilities.