Paper Info
Title
The Role of Surface, Semantic and Grammatical Features on Simplification of Spanish Medical Texts: A User Study.
Abstract
Simplifying medical texts facilitates readability and comprehension. While most simplification work focuses on English, we investigate whether features important for simplifying English text are similarly helpful for simplifying Spanish text. We conducted a user study on 15 Spanish medical texts using Amazon Mechanical Turk and measured perceived and actual difficulty. Using the median of the difficulty scores, we split the texts into easy and difficult groups and extracted 10 surface, 2 semantic and 4 grammatical features. Using t-tests, we identified those features that significantly distinguish easy text from difficult text in Spanish and compare with prior work in English. We found that easy Spanish texts use more repeated words and adverbs, less negations and more familiar words, similar to English. Also like English, difficult Spanish texts use more nouns and adjectives. However in contrast to English, easier Spanish texts contained longer sentences and used grammatical structures that were more varied.
Year
Venue
Field
2017
AMIA
Computer science,Linguistics
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
2017
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Partha Mukherjee111.02
Gondy Leroy252847.72
David Kauchak336325.92
Brianda Armenta Navarrete400.34
Damian Y. Romero Diaz520.70
Sonia Colina621.38