CLCM - A Linguistic Resource for Effective Simplification of Instructions in the Crisis Management Domain and its Evaluations

Due to the increasing number of emergency situations which can have substantial consequences, both financially and fatally, the Crisis Management (CM) domain is developing at an exponential speed. The efficient management of emergency situations relies on clear communication between all of the participants in a crisis situation. For these reasons the Text Complexity (TC) of the CM domain needed to be investigated and showed that CM domain texts exhibit high TC levels. This article presents a new linguistic resource in the form of Controlled Language (CL) guidelines for manual text simplification in the CM domain which aims to address high TC in the CM domain and produce clear messages to be used in crisis situations. The effectiveness of the resource has been tested via evaluation from several different perspectives important for the domain. The overall results show that the CLCM simplification has a positive impact on TC, reading comprehension, manual translation and machine translation. Additionally, an investigation of the cognitive difficulty in applying manual simplification operations led to interesting discoveries. This article provides details of the evaluation methods, the conducted experiments, their results and indications about future work.