Call for Papers

3rd Workshop on Tools and Resources for People with Reading Difficulties

READI @ LREC-COLING 2024



Workshop description

This interdisciplinary workshop invites participation from individuals
with experience and/or interest in applications, technologies, and
resources for reading. The general idea is to present state-of-the-art
methods, and ongoing research questions, i.e., how can Natural Language
Processing (NLP) methods leverage document accessibility? Are serious
games appropriate/efficient to enhance reading? What kind of solutions
AI proposes to help struggling readers? etc. By bringing together
researchers from various research communities, we aim to address the
issue from different angles:

- Design, evaluation, use, and education related to technologies for reading
- Assistive AI applications for learning to read
- Existing solutions based on enhancing cognitive strategies to improve reading comprehension skills
- Multimedia tools to develop literary education
- Natural language applications for automatic text adaptation
- AI-powered computer vision tools and applications
- Opportunities, challenges, risks of technology-enhanced reading
- ...


Motivation and Topics of Interest

With the growth of educational technologies, several innovative
technology applications and resources are devoted to how to foster
improvement in student learning to read. In addition, a number of
assistive technologies for reading have appeared in the last decades,
i.e. “devices and services that enhance the performance of individuals
with a disability by enabling them to complete tasks more effectively,
efficiently, and independently than otherwise possible” (Blackhurst,
1997). The field of special education has had a longstanding interest
in technology and the potential it holds for individuals with
language/speech disabilities, cognitive disorders, etc. (Edyburn,
2000). In this context, this workshop aims to present current
state-of-the-art applications and approaches addressed to a variety of
populations and contexts to enhance reading.

While proposing current research on technology-enhanced reading, we
would like to widen the perspective of the workshop for ‘field’
professionals (teachers and educators, speech-language pathologists,
etc.). The workshop will thus address topics concerning specialized
technology, tools, and resources, how they serve specific individuals
or processes (i.e., learning to read, reading, comprehending), the
impact of the devices on their lives and activities, etc. In the light
of recent advances in AI, we would like to bring to the fore innovative
works from research to applications in fieldwork.

The workshop aims to address the issue from a variety of domains and
languages, including education, natural language processing,
linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, psychophysics of
vision, etc. The focus will be on target populations struggling with
learning to read, or with decoding, or with comprehending, etc. such as
illiterates, aphasic or dyslexic readers, deaf or hard of hearing, low
vision or visually impaired readers, people with autism or
speech/language disorders, etc. to name a few. Topics include but are
not limited to the following:

- Measuring and evaluating readability and text complexity
- Models, corpora, lexicons for text adaptation
- Text adaptation approaches for target audiences
- Meaning representation and multimodal text adaptation
- Text generation of adapted contents
- Educational devices and/or smart technologies for reading:
- serious games for improving reading comprehension skills
- text-to-speech applications
- decoding training applications to strengthen early reading skills
- booklets with lexical resources to look up unknown words
- graded materials for adaptive learning
- ...


Important Dates

submission deadline: *February 26th, 2024*
notification of acceptance: April 7th, 2024
deadline for camera-ready versions: April 25th, 2024
workshop: May 20th or 21st, 2024


Paper Submission Instructions

Paper Length: submissions are expected to be between a minimum of 4 and
a maximum of 8 pages in length, plus unlimited pages for references.

Submission Format : all submissions must be formatted following the
LREC style guidelines (Word, OpenOffice, and LaTeX templates are available). ​

Submissions should be made via the START conference system
Papers that do not conform to these requirements will be rejected
without review.

The submissions will be anonymous (blind reviews).


Organizing Committee

Rémi Cardon Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Núria Gala Aix Marseille Université, France
Amalia Todirascu Université de Strasbourg, France
Rodrigo Wilkens Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium

Contact
Núria Gala (nuria.gala@univ-amu.fr)


Program Committee

Fernando Alva-Manchego, Cardiff University, UK
Delphine Bernhard, Université de Strasbourg, France
Dominique Brunato, ILC, Pisa, Italy
Rémi Cardon, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Éric Castet, Aix Marseille Université, France
Stéphanie Ducrot, Aix Marseille Université, France
Thomas François, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Núria Gala, Aix Marseille Université, France
Ludivine Javourey-Drevet, Université de Lille, France
Arne Jönsson, Linköping University, Sweden
Éole Lapeyre, Aix Marseille Université, France
Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia, Spain
Matthew Shardlow, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom
Didier Schwab, Université Grenoble Alpes, France
Anaïs Tack, K.U. Leuven, Belgium
Amalia Todirascu, Université de Strasbourg, France
Vincent Vandeghinste, Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Lge.
Institute), Belgium
Giulia Venturi, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale A. Zampolli
(ILC-CNR), Pisa, Italy
Elena Volodina, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Rodrigo Wilkens, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium


Describe and Share your LRs!

When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to
provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e.
also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been
used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your
research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC-COLING authors to share
the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse
and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).