Category Archives: News

Web Science 2021 conference and workshops

The 13th ACM Web Science 2021 conference to be held on June 21st- June 25th will be hosting 12 interdisciplinary workshops addressing how Web Science research can illuminate key contemporary issues and global challenges.

We really would love it if you would like to submit your ideas and even a paper to our AI and Inclusion workshop or just come and join us virtually during the afternoon we are allotted (yet to be published!).

Accepted workshop papers will be published in the companion collection of the ACM WebSci’21 proceedings.

AI and Inclusion – Overcoming accessibility gaps on the Social Web

The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web.

We are planning to make this workshop an interesting afternoon of presentations and a debate about how AI can help to achieve the goal of inclusion when thinking about the digital barriers that prevent people enjoying use of the social web.

Online interactivity and conversations should be accessible to all, all the more so during this period of isolation from face to face connections.

Important Dates:

Apr 23, 2021 — Workshop paper submission deadline

May 17, 2021 — Camera-ready deadline for the Proceedings

For more information, please see https://websci21.webscience.org/workshops

AI and Text Simplification

During the recent pandemic many organisations have produced documents that are designed to be easier to read such as the UK Government guidance about ‘National Lockdown: Stay at Home’ and Global Symbols has produced some simple information sheets with symbol versions. This type of support may help those with intellectual disabilities cope with complex content and Inclusion Europe offer guidelines for making text more understandable.
about the vaccine
However, making documents easier to read using text simplification techniques can take time. It is not just the choice of words that needs to be considered (the lexicon) but also the way sentences are written (the syntax) to remove complex grammatical structures.

John Rochford, has been working in this area for a long time with people who have cogntive impairments and has a blog called Clear Helper. He has been exploring the use of machine learning and natural language processing to speed automated text simplification and his new site is called EasyCovid-19 

This March saw John sharing his ideas for EasyText AI with a group of us, discussing how one could achieve improved automated text simplification and add keyword support using symbols to help those with intellectual disabilities cope better with web page content. The challenges include overcoming polysemy (multiple meanings) – words that look the same but may require very different symbols and the degree to which symbols can help rather than confuse. Using different forms of artificial intelligence and training data, allows us to think that it is possible to overcome some issues around ‘disambiguation’ (removing uncertainty of meaning), but ensuring web content personalisation, in terms of symbol choices, is quite a different challenge!
spring sentence

Web Page Accessibility and AI

computer with webpageOver the last year there has been an increasing amount of projects that have been using machine learning and image recognition to solve issues that cause accessibility barriers for web page users. Articles have been written about the subject. But we explored these ideas over a year ago having already added image recognition to check the accuracy of alternative texts on sites when carrying out an accessibility review on Web2Access.

Since that time we have been working on capturing data from online courses to develop training data via an onotology that can provide those working in education with a way of seeing what might cause a problem before the student even arrives on the course. The idea being that authors of the content can be alerted to the difficulties such as a lack of alternative texts or a need to annotate equations etc.

computer with presentationThe same can apply to online lectures provided for students working remotely. Live captioning from the videos are largely provided via automatic speech recognition. Once again a facilitator can be alerted to where errors are appearing in a live session, so that manual corrections can occur at speed and the quality of the output improved to provide not just more accurate captions over time, but also transcripts suitable for annotation. NRemote will provide a system that can be customised and offer students a chance to use teaching and learning materials in multiple formats.

We have also been discussing the use of text simplification that is making use of machine learning. The team behind EasyText AI have been making web pages easier to read and are now looking at the idea of incorporating text to symbol support where a user can choose a symbol set to suit their preference.

three sentences using symbols saying I read your red book today