Facilitating text understanding for e-learning users

Abstract

Web information on different disciplines (mainly technical ones) is mainly created by the different experts (engineers, scientists, physicians, lawyers, etc.) who use their own 'technical' language. On the other hand, this information is often read by general users who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the experts and have difficulties to understand and learn it. In order to allow e-learners to use any document available on the web and understand it, it is desirable to have a system that takes a text written with technical terms and automatically translates it in a plain language and provides additional information with the same kind of language. In this work we present the methodology and implementation detalis of such a system and describe the prototype we have developed for the health/medical field