TALN Natural Language Processing Research Group
Horacio Saggion delivered an invited talk at the Determit!
Horacio Saggion delivered an invited talk at the Determit! workshop focusing on the overall iDEM project and on language resources for text simplification.
Keynote Speaker
We have the pleasure to announce the following keynote speaker:
Horacio Saggion
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Title: Text Simplification as a Tool for Facilitating Democratic Participation in the iDEM Project
Abstract: A recent empirical study found that the European Commission (EC)’s public communications uses very complex language, specialized jargon, and a nominal style that obfuscates political action, excluding many people from democratic processes due to insufficiently accessible information. Accessibility is an underestimated asset for democratic participation, consequently, a lack of accessibility to information directly leads to the exclusion of several people from democracy. Persons who encounter difficulties making sense of content are a diverse group of individuals with varying degrees of reading, writing, and understanding abilities, including people with intellectual disabilities, older adults who struggle with long and complicated documents, or low-literacy people. The inclusion of people with language barriers in democracy is a sine qua non to guarantee full legitimate democratic outcomes. The EC has recently imposed new requirements across the European Union regarding the accessibility of some products and services for people with disabilities following the ratification by the EU of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). One way to guarantee that people have equal access to information is through the production of information in some form of easy language (e.g., plain language or easy-to-read). However, making information accessible to all requires considerable efforts and expertise, which sometimes limits the production of or the translation into easy language. In this talk I will describe the work carried out in the context of the Horizon Project iDEM to facilitate democratic participation for people with language barriers. The talk will highlight the creation of language resources within the project as well as the implementation of text simplification services integrated into a mobile application to facilitate participation in deliberative, democratic processes.