3rd Workshop on Tools and Resources for People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)

Aims of the Workshop

The workshop aims at presenting current state-of-the-art techniques and achievements for text simplification together with existing reading aids and resources for lifelong learning. The materials are addressed to children struggling with difficulties in learning to read, to the community of teachers, speech-language pathologists and parents seeking solutions, but also to those professionals involved with adults struggling with reading (illiterates, aphasic readers, low vision readers, etc.).

The workshop will address the issue from a variety of domains and languages, including natural language processing, linguistics, psycholinguistics, psychophysics of vision, and education.

The workshop will act as a stimulus for the discussion of several ongoing research questions driving current and future research by bringing together researchers from various research communities involved with tackling difficulties in reading.

Past editions : READI 2020, READI 2022.


Important Dates

Invited Speaker
Giulia Venturi (ILC-CNR, Pisa, Italy)

Title: Putting the right book into the hands of the right reader” in the era of Large Language Models

Abstract: The seminal work 'The Concept of Readability' by Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall in 1949 laid the foundation for extensive research in automatic readability assessment and text simplification. Introducing their reflections, the two authors assert that early attempts to define objective methods of measuring readability were primarily undertaken by educators, leaders in adult education, and librarians, who sought 'to find some means of putting the right book into the hand of the right reader'. My talk will stem from this notion of readability and explore some of the factors considered by Dale and Chall relevant to making a book readable, particularly factors related to style of expression, characteristics of readers, and textual genre. Drawing upon empirical case studies from my recent research activities, I will discuss how the perspective on the study of these factors has changed over time, in conjunction with changes and advancements in computational approaches to modeling linguistic complexity. They range from computational models employing explicit features to more recent Large Language Models implicitly encoding vast general-purpose knowledge. During my presentation, I will reflect on the fact that despite such changes in the perspective of study these factors still have an enduring significance, and they continue to hold prominence in current scholarly investigations.