Significance of learner dependent features for improving text readability using extractive summarization

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies play major role in all types of day to day life activities including Government, public and social domains. The need for HCI aspects to be taken care in these activities has become a predominant one. Especially, incorporating HCI features in the academic environment is getting more attention. In the case of reading materials associated with any type of academic process or content delivery, much focus is to be given so that even people with learning difficulties can get the information to his/her level of ability. Though lot of information is available in the academic scenario in the forms of text books, course ware, on line resources, web documents etc., not all content is readable by all. Tools and technologies must be made available to help people with learning difficulties including dyslexics. The idea is to reduce the burden levels of the learners with the help of assistive technologies. In this direction, this paper focuses on highlighting the importance of various features to be considered for making the text readable by all, using summarization techniques. Text summarization based on both document level and learner level features are discussed for making the content readable for people with learning difficulties. The experiments show that learner dependent features improve the readability of the text through summary as preview of the text.