Simplifying Coreference Chains for Dyslexic Children

We present a work aiming to generate adapted content for dyslexic children for French, in the context of the ALECTOR project. Thus, we developed a system to transform the texts at the discourse level. This system modifies the coreference chains, which are markers of text cohesion, by using rules. These rules were designed following a careful study of coreference chains in both original texts and its simplified versions. Moreover, in order to define reliable transformation rules, we analysed several coreference properties as well as the concurrent simplification operations in the aligned texts. This information is coded together with a coreference resolution system and a text rewritten tool in the proposed system, which comprise a coreference module specialised in written text and seven text transformation operations. The evaluation of the system firstly focused on check the simplification by manual validation of three judges. These errors were grouped into five classes that combined can explain 93{\%} of the errors. The second evaluation step consisted of measuring the simplification perception by 23 judges, which allow us to measure the simplification impact of the proposed rules.