Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR) at EMNLP 2022

website: https://taln.upf.edu/pages/tsar2022-ws

Call for Papers

The web provides an abundance of knowledge and information that can reach large populations. However, the way in which a text is written (vocabulary, syntax, or text organization/structure), or presented, can make it inaccessible for many people, especially for non-native speakers, people with low literacy, and people with some type of cognitive or linguistic impairments. The results of the Adult Literacy Survey (OECD, 2013) indicate that approximately 16.7% of the adult population (averaged over 24 highly-developed countries) requires lexical, 50% syntactic, and 89.4% conceptual simplification of everyday texts (Štajner, 2021).

Research on automatic text simplification (TS), textual accessibility, and readability have the potential to improve the social inclusion of marginalized populations. These related research areas have attracted attention in the past ten years, as evidenced by the growing number of publications in NLP conferences. While only about 300 articles in Google Scholar mentioned TS in 2010, this number has increased to about 600 in 2015 and greater than 1000 in 2020 (Štajner, 2021).

Recent research in automatic text simplification has mostly focused on proposing the use of methods derived from the deep learning paradigm (Glavaš and Štajner, 2015; Paetzold and Specia, 2016; Nisioi et al., 2017; Zhang and Lapata, 2017; Martin et al., 2020; Maddela et al., 2021; Sheang and Saggion, 2021). However, there are many important aspects of automatic text simplification that need the attention of our community: the design of appropriate evaluation metrics, the development of context-aware simplification solutions, the creation of appropriate language resources to support research and evaluation, the deployment of simplification in real environments for real users, the study of discourse factors in text simplification, the identification of factors affecting the readability of a text, etc. To overcome those issues, there is a need for the collaboration of CL/NLP researchers, machine learning and deep learning researchers, UI/UX and Accessibility professionals, as well as public organizations representatives (Štajner, 2021). The proposed TSAR workshop builds upon the recent success of several regional workshops that covered a subset of our topics of interest, including READI Workshops at LREC 2022 and LREC 2022, SEPLN 2021 Workshop on Current Trends in Text Simplification (CTTS), and the SimpleText workshop at CLEF 2021, as well as the birds-of-a-feather events on Text Simplification at NAACL 2021 (over 50 participants) and ACL 2022.

The TSAR workshop aims to foster collaboration among all parties interested in making information more accessible to all people. Through the two invited talks, a shared task on lexical simplification, the round table discussion, oral and poster presentations of novel research, we will discuss recent trends and developments in the area of automatic text simplification, text accessibility, automatic readability assessment, language resources and evaluation for text simplification, etc.

Topics

We invite contributions on the following topics (among others): * Lexical simplification; * Syntactic simplification; * Modular and end-to-end TS; * Sequence-to-sequence and zero-shot TS; * Controllable TS; * Text complexity assessment; * Complex word identification and lexical complexity prediction; * Corpora, lexical resources, and benchmarks for TS; * Evaluation of TS systems; * Domain-specific/adaptable TS (e.g. health, legal); * Other related topics (e.g. empirical and eye-tracking studies); * Assistive technologies for improving readability and comprehension including those going beyond text. * Text Simplification in Languages other than English * Multilingual TS * Readability Controlled MT

Submissions

We welcome two types of papers: long papers and short papers. Submissions should be made to the Softconf submission management system: https://softconf.com/emnlp2022/tsar. The papers should present novel research. The review will be double-blind and thus all submissions should be anonymized.

Format: Paper submissions must use the official EMNLP template, which is available as an Overleaf template and also downloadable directly (Latex and Word) (see here: https://2022.emnlp.org/calls/style-and-formatting/). Authors may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without review.

Long Papers: Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed, and unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should be included. Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on nature rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the proceedings between long papers presented orally and long papers presented as posters. ​ Short Papers: Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of short papers include: a small, focused contribution; a negative result; an opinion piece; an interesting application nugget Short papers may consist of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 pages), so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Short papers will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented orally and short papers presented as posters.

Important Dates

13 September 2022 (extended): paper submission deadline 2 October 2022: acceptance notification deadline 16 October 2022: camera-ready deadline 8 December 2022: Workshop at EMNLP

Proceedings

All accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings and published in ACL Anthology. Extended versions of the best papers will be invited for a special issue of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence focused on: applied research for TS and readability assessment in the context of TS.

Organizers

* Sanja Štajner, NLP Researcher, Germany * Horacio Saggion, Chair in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and Head of the LaSTUS Lab in the TALN-DTIC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra * Wei Xu, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology * Marcos Zampieri, Assistant Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology * Matthew Shardlow, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University * Daniel Ferrés, Post-Doctoral Research Assistant, Universitat Pompeu Fabra * Kai North, Ph.D. student, Rochester Institute of Technology * Kim Cheng Sheang, PhD student, Universitat Pompeu Fabra