Text Simplification for Russian as a Foreign Language

Student: Dmitrieva Anna

Supervisor: Alexey Malafeev

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities (Nizhny Novgorod)

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Applied Linguistics (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 9

Year of Graduation: 2016

This paper is focused on the problem of automatic adaptation of educational texts for learners of Russian as a foreign language. A method for lexical simplification of educational texts was described and implemented as a computer program. In this method, partial lexical simplification is performed via synonym replacement, using words from the minimal vocabularies for B1 and lower levels of RaaFL as simpler words. For choosing context-appropriate words, character n-gram language models with n equal to 4-6 were used; the models were trained and tested on a corpus of educational texts. The automatically simplified texts were evaluated during the program development with the help of RaaFL students, a teacher of RaaFL as an expert, and native Russian speakers.

Full text (added May 21, 2016)

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