Barriers in Reading Comprehension of University Students: Analysis of the Complicated Words Annotated in the VYTEDU-CW Corpus

Jenny Alexandra Ortiz-Zambrano, Arturo Montejo-Raéz

Abstract


Students often require a greater understanding of the lexicon that teachers use when dictating an assignment in class or in written texts as supporting material. Identifying and labelling difficult words has allowed us to examine the problem. A sample of students from the University of Guayaquil (Ecuador) was taken to experiment in a corpus of video transcripts that correspond to the different careers. After performing the analysis of the tagged words, the conclusions reached by other research papers in lexical simplification are confirmed and corroborates the recommendations of the Easy Reading guide prepared by Inclusion Europe in 2009. The investigation determined that the words labeled as difficult were specialized words, common lexical words, slang, English words, acronyms, among others. It was difficult for students to understand its meaning; in some cases, they either ignored its definition or just had the wrong idea of the lexicon. This work aims to be a contribution to future research in the area of lexical simplification applied to the development of solutions for detecting difficult words in the university academic field. Also, the type of complex expressions identified in the VYTEDU-CW corpus were characterized by the software, which enriches this resource while opening the possibility to organize a workshop where to promote research in the detection of difficult words to the Spanish. The support to validate these solutions is available to the scientific community.

Keywords


complex words; university scope; lexical simplification.

Full Text:

PDF

References


González, R. Comprensión lectora en estudiantes universitarios iniciales. Persona, (001), 43- 65 (1998).

Torunoglu-Selamet, D., Pamay, T., Eryigit, G. Simplification of Turkish Sentences. The First International Conference on Turkic Computational Linguistics, 55–59 (2016).

Inclusion Europe. In the same way, this article opens the possibility to organize a workshop to promote research in the detection of difficult words for Spanish in the educational field. It is proposed to achieve the lexical substitution of the difficult words contained in VYTEDU- CW as the next research objectiveRetrieved from http://easy-to-read.eu/wp-content/up-loads/2014/12/ES_Information_for_all.pdf (2009).

Neira Martínez, A. C., Reyes Reyes, F. T., & Riffo Ocares, B. E. Academic experience and reading comprehension strategies in first-year university students. Literature and linguistics, (31), pp. 221-244, (2015).

Ortiz, J., Montejo-Ráez, A. VYTEDU: A corpus of videos and transcriptions for research in the education domain. In: SEPLN-Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, vol. 59, pp. 167–170 (2017).

Ortiz, J., Varela, E.: Reading Comprehension in University Texts: The Metrics of Lexical Complexity in Corpus Analysis in Spanish. In: First International Conference 2018, , vol. 959, pp. 111–123. Springer, Nature Switzerland AG (2019).

Zambrano, J. O., MontejoRáez, A., Castillo, K. N. L., Mendoza, O. R. G., & Perdomo, B. C. C. (2019, March). VYTEDU-CW: Difficult Words as a Barrier in the Reading Comprehension of University Students. In The International Conference on Advances in Emerging Trends and Technologies (pp. 167-176). Springer, Cham.

Belart, V. F. La legibilidad: un factor fundamental para comprender un texto. Atención pri- maria, 34(3), 143-146 (2004).

Burešová, K. Text Simplification in Czech. PhD Disertation (2017).

Ferrés, D., Marimon, M., Saggion, H. YATS: Yet Another Text Simplifier. In International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, pp. 335-342. Springer, Cham (2016, June).

Saggion, H., Å tajner, S., Bott, S., Mille, S., Rello, L., Drndarevic, B.: Making it simplext: implementation and evaluation of a text simplification system for spanish. ACM Trans. Ac- cessible Comput. (TACCESS) 6(4), 14 (2015).

Paetzold, G. H. Reliable Lexical Simplification for Non-Native Speakers, pp. 9–16 (2015).

Bott, S., Rello, L., Drndarevic, B., Saggion, H. Can Spanish Be Simpler? LexSiS: Lexical Simplification for Spanish. Proceedings of COLING 2012, (December), pp. 357–374. Re- trieved from http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/C12-1023 (2012).

Garcia, Ó. (2012). Lectura fácil : Métodos de redacción y evaluación. Real Patronato Sobre Discapacidad, 140 (2012).

Alarcon, Rodrigo; Moreno López, Lourdes; Segura Bedmar, Isabel; Martínez Fernández, Paloma (2019). Lexical simplification approach using easy-to-read resources. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. 2019, 63: 95-102. doi:10.26342/2019-63-10

Gooding, S., & Kochmar, E. (2019, July). Complex Word Identification as a Sequence Labelling Task. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 1148-1153).

Finnimore, P., Fritzsch, E., King, D., Sneyd, A., Rehman, A. U., Alva-Manchego, F., & Vlachos, A. (2019). Strong Baselines for Complex Word Identification across Multiple Languages. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.05953.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18517/ijaseit.10.5.10809

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Published by INSIGHT - Indonesian Society for Knowledge and Human Development