Improving Text Readability through Segmentation into Rheses

Abstract

Enhancing text readability is crucial for readers with challenges like dyslexia. This paper delves into the segmentation of sentences into rheses, i.e. rhythmic and semantic units. Their aim is to clarify sentence structures for improved comprehension, through a harmonious balance between syntactic accuracy, the natural rhythm of reading aloud, and the delineation of meaningful units. This study relates and compares our various attempts to improve a pre-existing rhesis segmentation tool, which is based on the selection of candidate segmentations. We also release TeRheSe (Texts with Rhesis Segmentation), a bilingual dataset, segmented into rheses, comprising 12 books from classic literature in French and English. We evaluated our approaches on this dataset, showing the efficiency of a novel approach based on token classification, reaching a F1-score of 90.0% in English (previously 85.3%) and 91.3% in French (previously 88.0%). We also study the potential of leveraging prosodic elements, though its definitive impact remains inconclusive.

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