Towards an Automatic Easy-to-Read Adaptation of Morphological Features in Spanish Texts

Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa, Isam Diab, Álvaro González, Jesica Rivero Espinosa

Abstract: 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. The E2R Methodology includes, among others, a set of guidelines related to the writing of texts. Some of these guidelines focus on morphological features 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. Both linguistic structures are quite long, which is also related to another E2R guideline (“The use of long words should be avoided”). Currently, 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 Spanish texts in a (semi)-automatic fashion. Specifically, in this paper we present (a) the inclusive design approach for the development of E2R adaptation methods for avoiding adverbs ending in -mente and superlative forms, (b) the initial methods for adapting those morphological features to an E2R version, and (c) a preliminary user-based evaluation of the implementation of those methods.