How to Make Numerical Information Accessible: Experimental Identification of Simplification Strategies

Abstract

Abstract.Public information services and documents should be accessible to the widest possible readership. Information in newspapers often takes the form of numerical expressions which pose comprehension problems for people with limited education. A first possible approach to solve this important social problem is making numerical information accessible by rewriting difficult numerical expressions in a simpler way. To obtain guidelines for performing this task automatically, we have carried out a survey in which experts in numeracy were asked to simplify a range of proportion expressions, with three readerships in mind: (a) people who did not understand percentages; (b) people who did not understand decimals; (c) more generally, people with poor numeracy. Responses were consistent with our intuitions about how common values are considered simpler and how the value of the original expression influences the chosen simplification.

Exploring the Effects of Aggregation Choices on Untrained Visualization Users' Generalizations From Data

“…For instance, a statement about an estimate of central tendency, ‘The amount per purchase seems to average about 150’ can be interpreted as implying some uncertainty in the participant's estimate of the mean. Research in number sense suggests that people are sensitive to the ways in which rounded numbers imply uncertainty [BHG*11]. If the population mean is close, but not exactly 150, this would seem to align with what the participant stated.…”

One Half or 50%? An Eye-Tracking Study of Number Representation Readability

“…This work can motivate work on text simplification for textual accessibility regarding numerical expressions [3,4,38]. Also, these findings can have an impact on current interactive systems for people with dyslexia that modify the text presentation but not its content such as Claro ScreenRuler Suite [10], SeeWord [22] or IDEAL e-Book reader [31].…”

Summarising News Stories for Children

“…This will be explored in future work. For instance, numerical simplification (Power and Williams, 2012;Bautista et al, 2011), accurate conversion of passive to active voice (Siddharthan, 2010), sentence shortening to preferentially remove difficult words (Angrosh et al, 2014), lexical simplification (De Belder and Moens, 2010;Yatskar et al, 2010), explanatory descriptions of named entities (Siddharthan et al, 2011), simplifying causality and discourse connectives (Siddharthan, 2003;Siddharthan and Katsos, 2010) and defining terminology (Elhadad, 2006) have all been demonstrated for text simplification systems.…”