Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR) at EMNLP 
2022

website: https://taln.upf.edu/pages/tsar2022-ws


Call for Papers

The web provides an abundance of knowledge and information that can reach large 
populations. However, the way in which a text is written (vocabulary, syntax, 
or text organization/structure), or presented, can make it inaccessible for 
many people, especially for non-native speakers, people with low literacy, and 
people with some type of cognitive or linguistic impairments. The results of 
the Adult Literacy Survey (OECD, 2013) indicate that approximately 16.7% of the 
adult population (averaged over 24 highly-developed countries) requires 
lexical, 50% syntactic, and 89.4% conceptual simplification of everyday texts 
(Štajner, 2021).

Research on automatic text simplification (TS), textual accessibility, and 
readability have the potential to improve the social inclusion of marginalized 
populations. These related research areas have attracted attention in the past 
ten years, as evidenced by the growing number of publications in NLP 
conferences. While only about 300 articles in Google Scholar mentioned TS in 
2010, this number has increased to about 600 in 2015 and greater than 1000 in 
2020 (Štajner, 2021).

Recent research in automatic text simplification has mostly focused on 
proposing the use of methods derived from the deep learning paradigm (Glavaš 
and Štajner, 2015; Paetzold and Specia, 2016; Nisioi et al., 2017; Zhang and 
Lapata, 2017; Martin et al., 2020; Maddela et al., 2021; Sheang and Saggion, 
2021). However, there are many important aspects of automatic text 
simplification that need the attention of our community: the design of 
appropriate evaluation metrics, the development of context-aware simplification 
solutions, the creation of appropriate language resources to support research 
and evaluation, the deployment of simplification in real environments for real 
users, the study of discourse factors in text simplification, the 
identification of factors affecting the readability of a text, etc. To overcome 
those issues, there is a need for the collaboration of CL/NLP researchers, 
machine learning and deep learning researchers, UI/UX and Accessibility 
professionals, as well as public organizations representatives (Štajner, 2021).
The proposed TSAR workshop builds upon the recent success of several regional 
workshops that covered a subset of our topics of interest, including READI 
Workshops at LREC 2022 and LREC 2022, SEPLN 2021 Workshop on Current Trends in 
Text Simplification (CTTS), and the SimpleText workshop at CLEF 2021, as well 
as the birds-of-a-feather events on Text Simplification at NAACL 2021 (over 50 
participants) and ACL 2022.

The TSAR workshop aims to foster collaboration among all parties interested in 
making information more accessible to all people. Through the two invited 
talks, a shared task on lexical simplification, the round table discussion, 
oral and poster presentations of novel research, we will discuss recent trends 
and developments in the area of automatic text simplification, text 
accessibility, automatic readability assessment, language resources and 
evaluation for text simplification, etc.


Topics

We invite contributions on the following topics (among others):
* Lexical simplification;
* Syntactic simplification;
* Modular and end-to-end TS;
* Sequence-to-sequence and zero-shot TS;
* Controllable TS;
* Text complexity assessment;
* Complex word identification and lexical complexity prediction;
* Corpora, lexical resources, and benchmarks for TS;
* Evaluation of TS systems;
* Domain-specific/adaptable TS (e.g. health, legal);
* Other related topics (e.g. empirical and eye-tracking studies);
* Assistive technologies for improving readability and comprehension including 
those going beyond text.
* Text Simplification in Languages other than English
* Multilingual TS
* Readability Controlled MT


Submissions

We welcome two types of papers: long papers and short papers. Submissions 
should be made to the Softconf submission management system: 
https://softconf.com/emnlp2022/tsar. The papers should present novel research. 
The review will be double-blind and thus all submissions should be anonymized.

Format: Paper submissions must use the official EMNLP template, which is 
available as an Overleaf template and also downloadable directly (Latex and 
Word) (see here: https://2022.emnlp.org/calls/style-and-formatting/). Authors 
may not modify these style files or use templates designed for other 
conferences. Submissions that do not conform to the required styles, including 
paper size, margin width, and font size restrictions, will be rejected without 
review.

Long Papers: Long papers must describe substantial, original, completed, and 
unpublished work. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation and analysis should 
be included. Long papers may consist of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus 
unlimited pages of references. Final versions of long papers will be given one 
additional page of content (up to 9 pages), so that reviewers’ comments can be 
taken into account. Long papers will be presented orally or as posters as 
determined by the program committee. The decisions as to which papers will be 
presented orally and which as poster presentations will be based on nature 
rather than the quality of the work. There will be no distinction in the 
proceedings between long papers presented orally and long papers presented as 
posters.
​
Short Papers: Short paper submissions must describe original and unpublished 
work. Please note that a short paper is not a shortened long paper. Instead, 
short papers should have a point that can be made in a few pages. Some kinds of 
short papers include: a small, focused contribution; a negative result; an 
opinion piece; an interesting application nugget Short papers may consist of up 
to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Final 
versions of short papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 5 
pages), so that reviewers' comments can be taken into account. Short papers 
will be presented orally or as posters as determined by the program committee. 
While short papers will be distinguished from long papers in the proceedings, 
there will be no distinction in the proceedings between short papers presented 
orally and short papers presented as posters.


Important Dates

13 September 2022 (extended): paper submission deadline
2 October 2022: acceptance notification deadline
16 October 2022: camera-ready deadline
8 December 2022: Workshop at EMNLP


Proceedings

All accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings and published 
in ACL Anthology. Extended versions of the best papers will be invited for a 
special issue of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence focused on: applied 
research for TS and readability assessment in the context of TS.


Organizers

* Sanja Štajner, NLP Researcher, Germany
* Horacio Saggion, Chair in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and 
Head of the LaSTUS Lab in the TALN-DTIC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
* Wei Xu, Assistant Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
* Marcos Zampieri, Assistant Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology
* Matthew Shardlow, Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University
* Daniel Ferrés, Post-Doctoral Research Assistant, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
* Kai North, Ph.D. student, Rochester Institute of Technology
* Kim Cheng Sheang, PhD student, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

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