LINGUIST List 23.4003
Thu Sep 27 2012
Diss: Applied Ling/ Comp Ling/ General Ling/Psycholing/ Text/Corpus Ling/Translation/ English: Temnikova: 'Text Complexity and Text Simplification...'
Editor for this issue: Lili Xia
<lxialinguistlist.org>
Date: 26-Sep-2012
From: Irina Temnikova <irina.temnikova
gmail.com>
Subject: Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain
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Institution: University of Wolverhampton
Program: School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Irina Temnikova
Dissertation Title: Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain
Dissertation URL:
http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/papers/temnikova-thesis.php#abstract
Linguistic Field(s):
Applied Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
General Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
Translation
Subject Language(s):
English (eng)
Dissertation Director:
Ruslan Mitkov
Richard Evans
Le An Ha
Dissertation Abstract:
Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantiallosses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential thattexts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable.
This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisismanagement sub-language and with methods to produce new, cleartexts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents whichare too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinarystudy makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First,it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used inthe domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written languagecomplexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novelcorpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the textcomplexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeedexhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to theEnglish language controlled language writing guidelines which, whenapplied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity andambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality ofcommunication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations,the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts whichwere re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points ofview. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existingevaluation approaches and develops new methods which are moreappropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experimentsâ€" evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users' acceptability.
The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of thecontrolled language on text complexity, reading comprehension understress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) show apositive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents andthus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users'acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplificationand helps to determine directions for future implementation.
The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machinetranslation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides originalcontributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and naturallanguage generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable forseveral scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and anumber of different sub-fields of NLP.
Page Updated: 27-Sep-2012