Language Technology for Accessibility

One research focus of the Department of Computational Linguistics is on the contribution of language technology to accessibility for persons with disabilities and special educational needs. This group is headed by Dr. Sarah Ebling.

A brief overview of some research foci and challenges in this field can be found here, presented by Dr. Ebling.

Datasets & Resources

A complete list of publicly available datasets and resources developed by members of the research group can be found here.

Current Projects

Completed Projects

Publications

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Kew, Tannon; Ebling, Sarah (2022). Target-Level Sentence Simplification as Controlled Paraphrasing. In: Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), Abu Dhabi, 8 Dezember 2022.
Müller, Mathias; Ebling, Sarah; Avramidis, Eleftherios; Battisti, Alessia; Berger, Michèle; Bowden, Richard; Braffort, Annelies; Cihan Camgöz, Necati; España-Bonet, Cristina; Grundkiewicz, Roman; Jiang, Zifan; Koller, Oscar; Moryossef, Amit; Perrollaz, Regula; Reinhard, Sabine; Rios, Annette; Shterionov, Dimitar; Sidler-Miserez, Sandra; Tissi, Katja; Van Landuyt, Davy (2022). Findings of the First WMT Shared Task on Sign Language Translation (WMT-SLT22). In: Seventh Conference on Machine Translation, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 7 Dezember 2022 - 8 Dezember 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics, 744-772.
Hauser, Renate; Vamvas, Jannis; Ebling, Sarah; Volk, Martin (2022). A Multilingual Simplified Language News Corpus. In: 2nd Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI) within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, France, 24 Juni 2022. European Language Resources Association, 25-30.
Müller, Mathias; Jiang, Zifan; Moryossef, Amit; Rios, Annette; Ebling, Sarah (2022). Considerations for meaningful sign language machine translation based on glosses. arXiv.org 15464, University of Zurich.
Ebling, Sarah; Battisti, Alessia; Kostrzewa, Marek; Pfütze, Dominik; Rios, Annette; Säuberli, Andreas; Spring, Nicolas (2022). Automatic Text Simplification for German. Frontiers in Communication, 7:706718.
Rios, Annette; Spring, Nicolas; Kew, Tannon; Kostrzewa, Marek; Säuberli, Andreas; Müller, Mathias; Ebling, Sarah (2021). A New Dataset and Efficient Baselines for Document-level Text Simplification in German. In: Third Workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization, Online and in Dominican Republic, 10 November 2021. ACL Anthology, 152-161.
Spring, Nicolas; Rios, Annette; Ebling, Sarah (2021). Exploring German Multi-Level Text Simplification. In: International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021), online, 1 September 2021 - 3 September 2021. ACL Anthology, 1339-1349.
Moryossef, Amit; Tsochantaridis, Ioannis; Dinn, Joe; Camgöz, Necati Cihan; Bowden, Richard; Jiang, Tao; Rios, Annette; Müller, Mathias; Ebling, Sarah (2021). Evaluating the Immediate Applicability of Pose Estimation for Sign Language Recognition. In: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, Nashville, TN, USA, 20 June 2021 - 25 June 2021.
Moryossef, Amit; Tsochantaridis, Ioannis; Aharoni, Roee; Ebling, Sarah; Narayanan, Srini (2020). Real-Time Sign Language Detection using Human Pose Estimation. arXiv.org 04637, University of Zurich.
Klenner, Manfred; Göhring, Anne; Amsler, Michael (2020). Harmonization Sometimes Harms. In: Proceedings of the 5th Swiss Text Analytics Conference (SwissText) & 16th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS), Winterthur, 23 June 2020 - 25 June 2020, swisstext-and-konvens-2020.
Proceedings of the 5th Swiss Text Analytics Conference (SwissText) & 16th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS). Edited by: Ebling, Sarah; Tuggener, Don; Hürlimann, Manuela; Cieliebak, M; Volk, Martin (2020). Zurich: CEUR-ws.
Battisti, Alessia; Pfütze, Dominik; Säuberli, Andreas; Kostrzewa, Marek; Ebling, Sarah (2020). A Corpus for Automatic Readability Assessment and Text Simplification of German. In: 12th Edition of its Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, Marseille, 11 May 2020 - 16 May 2020, European Language Resources Associatio.
Säuberli, Andreas; Ebling, Sarah; Volk, Martin (2020). Benchmarking Data-driven Automatic Text Simplification for German. In: Gala, Nuria; Wilkens, Rodrigo. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Tools and Resources to Empower People with REAding DIfficulties (READI). Marseille: European Language Resources Association, 41-48.
Battisti, Alessia; Ebling, Sarah; Volk, Martin (2019). An Empirical Analysis of Linguistic, Typographic, and Structural Features in Simplified German Texts. In: Sixth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2019), Bari, 13 November 2019 - 15 November 2019, CLiC-it.
Haug, Tobias; Ebling, Sarah (2019). Using Open-Source Software for Sign Language Learning and Assessment. International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning, 14(19):188-196.
Haug, Tobias; Ebling, Sarah; Boyes Braem, Penny; Tissi, Katja; Sidler-Miserez, Sandra (2019). Sign language learning and assessment in German Switzerland: Exploring the potential of vocabulary size tests for Swiss German Sign Language. Language Education & Assessment, 2(1):20-40.
Battisti, Alessia. Automatic Cluster Analysis of Texts in Simplified German. 2019, University of Zurich, Faculty of Arts.
Ebling, Sarah (2018). Sprachtechnologie für Menschen mit Behinderungen. In: Sonderpädagogik in der digitalisierten Lernwelt. Beiträge der nationalen Tagung Netzwerk Forschung Sonderpädagogik, Zurich, 4 September 2018 - 4 September 2018, 29-46.
Ebling, Sarah; Camgöz, Necati Cihan; Boyes Braem, Penny; et al (2018). SMILE Swiss German Sign Language Dataset. In: Calzolari, Nicoletta; et al. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 4221-4229.
Kacorri, Hernisa; Huenerfauth, Matt; Ebling, Sarah; Patel, Kasmira; Menzies, Kellie; Willard, Mackenzie (2017). Regression Analysis of Demographic and Technology-Experience Factors Influencing Acceptance of Sign Language Animation. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS), 10(1):Article No.: 3.

Media coverage

SNSF Horizonte no. 112 (March 2017)

Google AI Blog post on Amit Moryossef's work to which we contributed (October 2020)

«ChatGPT & Co. – eine Chance für Forschung und Lehre?» - Panel discussion (March 2023)

Talk on TEDx Zurich (fast forward to approx. 04:01:00) (March 2023)

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