Establishing Implementation Priorities in Aiding Writers of Controlled Crisis Management Texts

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 654–659, Hissar, Bulgaria, 12-14 September 2011. Establishing Implementation Priorities in Aiding Writers of Controlled Crisis Management Texts Irina Temnikova Research Institute in Information and Language Processing University of Wolverhampton, UK irina.temnikova@gmail.com Abstract As clarity in the Crisis Management do- main is crucial, and there exists an enor- mous amount of Crisis Management doc- uments, a specific language resource (the Controlled Language for Crisis Manage- ment, CLCM) for editing Crisis Manage- ment instructions in English has been pre- viously developed. Based on a specially designed controlled language evaluation experiment, we have determined that man- ual simplification, far from being easy, is an extremely time-consuming process and thus automatization is essential in order to facilitate the writing of clear instruc- tions. This article describes this experi- ment which also aims to determine which operations should be privileged and are more urgent to be implemented in order to address the most critical issues first. 1 Introduction Attention paid to the Crisis Management domain has strongly increased in recent years (Schneid and Collins, 2001), due to the urgent need to guar- antee safe and efficient management of emergency situations. There exists an enormous amount of al- ready written crisis management documents and new ones are being created with exponentially growing speed. Efficient communication between crisis management teams and local populations is crucial in situations in which there is a very short reaction time (Ogrizek and Guillery, 1999; Winerman, 2009). It is also known that human comprehension under stress is different from the one in normal conditions (Kiwan et al., 1999). For this reason the clarity and conciseness of the information exchanged during emergency situa- tions is crucial. A controlled language (CL) is a very good manual approach for ensuring clar- ity of crisis management texts. Unfortunately, it has been previously shown (Goyvaerts, 1996; Hui- jsen, 1998) that manual editing of texts accord- ing to controlled language guidelines is a diffi- cult and highly time-consuming process. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are thus a good way to at least partially automatize and thus improve and speed up manual text simplifi- cation. This article introduces a controlled lan- guage for text simplification in the crisis manage- ment domain and its evaluation in terms of time and cognitive efforts for the human simplifiers and draws conclusions about which operations to im- plement first, in order to speed up and facilitate manual controlled language-based simplification. The article is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the related work in the crisis management domain and in Controlled Languages aids, Sec- tion 3 presents the Controlled Language for Cri- sis Management (CLCM), Section 4 describes the text simplification evaluation experiment, Section 5 discusses the results of the experiment and Sec- tion 6 provides some conclusions and future work. 2 Related Work Although the large recent activity in crisis man- agement, there are not many NLP works in this domain. Roman (2008) has worked on redundancy identification from personal web blogs on emer- …

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