Authors:
Gruteke Klein, Keren, gkeren@campus.technion.ac.il, Technion
Shubi, Omer, shubi@campus.technion.ac.il, Technion
Frenkel, Shachar, fshachar@campus.technion.ac.il, Technion
Berzak, Yevgeni, berzak@technion.ac.il, Technion
Keywords: Psychology,Language Comprehension,Natural Language Processing,Reading,Eye tracking
Abstract:
Text simplification is a common practice for making texts easier to read and easier to understand. To which extent does it achieve these goals, and which participant and text characteristics drive simplification benefits? In this work, we address these questions for the first time for the population of adult native (L1) English speakers. We find that 42\% of the readers exhibit reading facilitation effects, while only 2\% improve reading comprehension accuracy. We further observe that reading fluency benefits are larger for slower and less experienced readers, while reading comprehension benefits are more substantial in lower comprehension readers, but not vice versa. Finally, we find that selecting high-complexity original texts is key for enhancing reading fluency, while substantially reducing complexity is more pertinent to improving comprehension. Our study highlights the potential of eye tracking measures in the evaluation of text simplification and distills empirically driven principles for enhancing simplification effectiveness.