Oliver Alonzo
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
Research has revealed benefits and interest among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) adults in reading-assistance tools powered by Automatic Text Simplification (ATS), a technology whose development benefits from evaluations by specific user groups. While prior work has provided guidance for evaluating text complexity among DHH adults, researchers lack guidance for evaluating the fluency of automatically simplified texts, which may contain errors from the simplification process. Thus, we conduct methodological research on the effectiveness of metrics (including reading speed; comprehension questions; and subjective judgements of understandability, readability, grammaticality, and system performance) for evaluating texts controlled to be at different levels of fluency, when measured among DHH participants at different literacy levels. Reading speed and grammaticality judgements effectively distinguished fluency levels among participants across literacy levels. Readability and understandability judgements, however, only worked among participants with higher literacy. Our findings provide methodological guidance for designing ATS evaluations with DHH participants.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517566
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)