IRAAL Online Lecture: Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Tools in Text Readability Assessment

December 11, 2020, 5pm

Online (organized by IRAAL)

http://www.iraal.ie/events,
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85880542813?pwd=L1hGVTdNUVhzTkV2YkJFUlFid0pIZz09

With the current trend promoted inter alia by the Plain English Campaign in the UK, which aims at guarding against publicising gobbledygook or misleading public information and encouraging the creation of client-friendly texts, i.e. comprehensible at the level of an average reader, new NLP tools have been recently designed for text analysis, which help to verify the readability level of functional texts. The aim of this talk is to share information regarding the concept of readability and to demonstrate some NLP tools dedicated to automatic text readability analysis for the English language as well as to show the results of my own research devoted to the analysis of the readability of such texts as: patient information leaflets about selected drugs, post-hospitalisation booklets for acute coronary syndrome patients, hospital discharge summaries, and information websites for colon cancer patients. All these text types are written by experts for laymen and thus they should be devoid of difficult words and saturation with technical and specialised terms.

Dr Anna Bączkowska has a PhD and habilitation in English Linguistics from the University of Łódź, Poland; she specialises in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, language teaching and audiovisual translation. Anna is currently affiliated with the University of Gdańsk, Poland, where she teaches corpus linguistics and NLP tools in text analysis and linguistics research methods. She has guest-lectured in Italy, UK, Spain, Portugal, Kazakhstan, Ireland and Norway.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85880542813?pwd=L1hGVTdNUVhzTkV2YkJFUlFid0pIZz09