ACL 2013 Workshop: PITR 2013
The Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations
8 August, 2013

The Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations Workshop will be be held in conjunction with the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2013 conference, 4 - 9 August, 2013, at the National Palace of Culture, Sofia, Bulgaria.

This workshop is an ACL Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SIG-SLPAT) sponsored workshop.

---

Paper submission deadline extended to Friday May 3rd !!

---

CALL FOR PAPERS

Many NLP systems generate or reformulate human language but how readable is the output? What makes language easy or difficult to read for different types of readers? How can existing text be manipulated to improve information access? How does writing style affect readability, comprehension, and appreciation of text? The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in these questions amongst computational linguists as attention turns to more sophisticated techniques for textual presentation and to address the widely differing needs of end users. The relevance of this research area has spawned a number of workshops on related topics, for example, SL-PAT 2012 (slpat.org) and NLP4ITA 2012 (www.taln.upf.edu/nlp4ita/), and a new special interest group, Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (slpat.org), which sponsors this workshop.

PITR is a cross-disciplinary workshop bringing together researchers in any field concerned with the readability, accessibility and quality of text, particularly computational linguists, psycholinguists and educational researchers. We solicit papers on:

• Reformulation of existing text (text-to-text systems)
• Generation of readable language from data (data-to-text systems)
• Generation of text in specific styles and registers for readability
• Evaluation of language simplification strategies
• Evaluation of the readability of computer-generated text
• Evaluation of the readability of machine translation output
• Prediction of aspects of text style related to readability
• Prediction of the readability of documents
• Readability issues in specialist texts such as questionnaires, exam questions, safety instructions, etc.
• Novel evaluation strategies for assessing text readability
• Novel readability metrics
• Techniques for simplifying lexis
• Techniques for simplifying syntax
• Techniques for simplifying discourse properties (making text more transparent, etc.)
• Techniques for manipulating textual layout to improve accessibility
• Techniques for making descriptions of numerical quantities more accessible
• Techniques for making technical terminology more accessible
• Techniques for making descriptions of logical statements more accessible
• Techniques for explaining complex ideas through accessible text
• Systems aimed at adults with poor literacy
• Systems aimed at children learning to read
• Systems aimed at 2nd language learners
• Systems aimed at people with language deficits (aphasia, deafness, neurodegeneration, etc.)
• Systems aimed at non-experts accessing technical material

---

SUBMISSIONS

Papers should prepared in ACL format not exceeding 8 pages in length plus up to 2 additional pages for references. Papers should also be anonymised for blind reviewing.

Please submit your paper via the online START Conference Manager system.

Some authors will be invited to give oral presentations. All accepted authors will be expected to present a poster. Last year, the poster session was very lively, giving poster-only authors and oral-presentation authors ample opportunities to discuss their research.

---

IMPORTANT DATES

May 3, 2013: Deadline for paper submission
May 29, 2013: Notification of acceptance
June 7, 2013: Camera-ready deadline
August 8, 2013: PITR 2013

---

ORGANISERS

Sandra Williams, The Open University, UK.
Advaith Siddharthan, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

---

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Julian Brooke, University of Toronto, Canada.
Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Microsoft Research (Redmond), USA.
Siobhan Devlin, University of Sunderland, UK.
Micha Elsner, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Thomas François, University of Louvain, Belgium.
Caroline Gasperin, TouchType Ltd., UK.
Albert Gatt, University of Malta, Malta.
Pablo Gervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Iryna Gurevych, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany.
Raquel Hervás, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.
Véronique Hoste, University College Ghent, Belgium.
Matt Huenerfauth, The City University of New York (CUNY), USA.
Iustina Ilisei, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Annie Louis, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Hitoshi Nishikawa, NTT, Japan.
Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK.
Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
Irina Temnikova, University of Wolverhampton, UK.
Ielka van der Sluis, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Kristian Woodsend, University of Edinburgh, UK.

---

Last modified: April 2013, S.H.Williams