Call for Papers

3rd Workshop on Tools and Resources for People with Reading Difficulties

READI @ LREC-COLING 2024 https://cental.uclouvain.be/readi2024/

Workshop description

This interdisciplinary workshop invites participation from individuals with experience and/or interest in applications, technologies, and resources for reading. The general idea is to present state-of-the-art methods, and ongoing research questions, i.e., how can Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods leverage document accessibility? Are serious games appropriate/efficient to enhance reading? What kind of solutions AI proposes to help struggling readers? etc. By bringing together researchers from various research communities, we aim to address the issue from different angles:

- Design, evaluation, use, and education related to technologies for reading - Assistive AI applications for learning to read - Existing solutions based on enhancing cognitive strategies to improve reading comprehension skills - Multimedia tools to develop literary education - Natural language applications for automatic text adaptation - AI-powered computer vision tools and applications - Opportunities, challenges, risks of technology-enhanced reading - ...

Motivation and Topics of Interest

With the growth of educational technologies, several innovative technology applications and resources are devoted to how to foster improvement in student learning to read. In addition, a number of assistive technologies for reading have appeared in the last decades, i.e. “devices and services that enhance the performance of individuals with a disability by enabling them to complete tasks more effectively, efficiently, and independently than otherwise possible” (Blackhurst, 1997). The field of special education has had a longstanding interest in technology and the potential it holds for individuals with language/speech disabilities, cognitive disorders, etc. (Edyburn, 2000). In this context, this workshop aims to present current state-of-the-art applications and approaches addressed to a variety of populations and contexts to enhance reading.

While proposing current research on technology-enhanced reading, we would like to widen the perspective of the workshop for ‘field’ professionals (teachers and educators, speech-language pathologists, etc.). The workshop will thus address topics concerning specialized technology, tools, and resources, how they serve specific individuals or processes (i.e., learning to read, reading, comprehending), the impact of the devices on their lives and activities, etc. In the light of recent advances in AI, we would like to bring to the fore innovative works from research to applications in fieldwork.

The workshop aims to address the issue from a variety of domains and languages, including education, natural language processing, linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, psychophysics of vision, etc. The focus will be on target populations struggling with learning to read, or with decoding, or with comprehending, etc. such as illiterates, aphasic or dyslexic readers, deaf or hard of hearing, low vision or visually impaired readers, people with autism or speech/language disorders, etc. to name a few. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

- Measuring and evaluating readability and text complexity - Models, corpora, lexicons for text adaptation - Text adaptation approaches for target audiences - Meaning representation and multimodal text adaptation - Text generation of adapted contents - Educational devices and/or smart technologies for reading: - serious games for improving reading comprehension skills - text-to-speech applications - decoding training applications to strengthen early reading skills - booklets with lexical resources to look up unknown words - graded materials for adaptive learning - ...

Important Dates

submission deadline: *February 26th, 2024* notification of acceptance: April 7th, 2024 deadline for camera-ready versions: April 25th, 2024 workshop: May 20th or 21st, 2024

Paper Submission Instructions

Paper Length: submissions are expected to be between a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 8 pages in length, plus unlimited pages for references.

Submission Format : all submissions must be formatted following the LREC style guidelines https://lrec-coling-2024.org/authors-kit/ (Word, OpenOffice, and LaTeX templates are available). ​

Submissions should be made via the START conference system: https://softconf.com/lrec-coling2024/readi2024/.

Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected without review.

The submissions will be anonymous (blind reviews).

Organizing Committee

Rémi Cardon Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Núria Gala Aix Marseille Université, France Amalia Todirascu Université de Strasbourg, France Rodrigo Wilkens Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Contact Núria Gala (nuria.gala@univ-amu.fr)

Program Committee

Fernando Alva-Manchego, Cardiff University, UK Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France Dominique Brunato, ILC, Pisa, Italy Rémi Cardon, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Éric Castet, Aix Marseille Université, France Stéphanie Ducrot, Aix Marseille Université, France Thomas François, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium Núria Gala, Aix Marseille Université, France Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Université de Lille, France Arne Jönsson, Linköping University, Sweden Éole Lapeyre, Aix Marseille Université, France Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia, Spain Matthew Shardlow, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom Didier Schwab, Université Grenoble Alpes, France Anaïs Tack, K.U. Leuven, Belgium Amalia Todirascu, Université de Strasbourg, France Vincent Vandeghinste, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Lge. Institute), Belgium Giulia Venturi, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale A. Zampolli (ILC-CNR), Pisa, Italy Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden Rodrigo Wilkens, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Describe and Share your LRs!

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC-COLING authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).