23.4003, Diss: Applied Ling/ Comp Ling/ General Ling/Psycholing/ Text/Corpus Ling/Translation/ English: Temnikova: 'Text Complexity and Text Simplification...'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-23-4003. Thu Sep 27 2012. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 23.4003, Diss: Applied Ling/ Comp Ling/ General Ling/Psycholing/ Text/Corpus Ling/Translation/ English: Temnikova: 'Text Complexity and Text Simplification...'

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Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2012 10:43:10
From: Irina Temnikova [irina.temnikova at 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(s):
Ruslan Mitkov
Richard Evans
Le An Ha

Dissertation Abstract:

Due to the fact that emergency situations can lead to substantial 
losses, both financial and in terms of human lives, it is essential that 
texts used in a crisis situation be clearly understandable.


This thesis is concerned with the study of the complexity of the crisis 
management sub-language and with methods to produce new, clear 
texts and to rewrite pre-existing crisis management documents which 
are too complex to be understood. By doing this, this interdisciplinary 
study makes several contributions to the crisis management field. First, 
it contributes to the knowledge of the complexity of the texts used in 
the domain, by analysing the presence of a set of written language 
complexity issues derived from the psycholinguistic literature in a novel 
corpus of crisis management documents. Second, since the text 
complexity analysis shows that crisis management documents indeed 
exhibit high numbers of text complexity issues, the thesis adapts to the 
English language controlled language writing guidelines which, when 
applied to the crisis management language, reduce its complexity and 
ambiguity, leading to clear text documents. Third, since low quality of 
communication can have fatal consequences in emergency situations, 
the proposed controlled language guidelines and a set of texts which 
were re-written according to them are evaluated from multiple points of 
view. In order to achieve that, the thesis both applies existing 
evaluation approaches and develops new methods which are more 
appropriate for the task. These are used in two evaluation experiments 
â€" evaluation on extrinsic tasks and evaluation of users' acceptability.


The evaluations on extrinsic tasks (evaluating the impact of the 
controlled language on text complexity, reading comprehension under 
stress, manual translation, and machine translation tasks) show a 
positive impact of the controlled language on simplified documents and 
thus ensure the quality of the resource. The evaluation of users' 
acceptability contributes additional findings about manual simplification 
and helps to determine directions for future implementation.


The thesis also gives insight into reading comprehension, machine 
translation, and cross-language adaptability, and provides original 
contributions to machine translation, controlled languages, and natural 
language generation evaluation techniques, which make it valuable for 
several scientific fields, including Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and a 
number of different sub-fields of NLP. 






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