%0 Journal Article
%T Use of Genetic Algorithm for Cohesive Summary Extraction to Assist Reading Difficulties
%A K. Nandhini
%A S. R. Balasundaram
%J Applied Computational Intelligence and Soft Computing
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/945623
%X Learners with reading difficulties normally face significant challenges in understanding the text-based learning materials. In this regard, there is a need for an assistive summary to help such learners to approach the learning documents with minimal difficulty. An important issue in extractive summarization is to extract cohesive summary from the text. Existing summarization approaches focus mostly on informative sentences rather than cohesive sentences. We considered several existing features, including sentence location, cardinality, title similarity, and keywords to extract important sentences. Moreover, learner-dependent readability-related features such as average sentence length, percentage of trigger words, percentage of polysyllabic words, and percentage of noun entity occurrences are considered for the summarization purpose. The objective of this work is to extract the optimal combination of sentences that increase readability through sentence cohesion using genetic algorithm. The results show that the summary extraction using our proposed approach performs better in -measure, readability, and cohesion than the baseline approach (lead) and the corpus-based approach. The task-based evaluation shows the effect of summary assistive reading in enhancing readability on reading difficulties. 1. Introduction Students with learning difficulties are diverse in nature, and the difficulties include reading difficulties, math difficulties, writing difficulties, and other problems related with the learning process. About 8% to 10% of students are having learning difficulties [1]. As reading is an essential component in life, our focus is mainly on the learners with reading difficulties. Challenges do exist while comprehending and organizing information from text for such learners. Learners find greater difficulty when they are reading at their earlier stage because of the amount of information to be read [2]. Summarizing can either be taught [3] or understood as one of the several strategies [4] and can be shown to improve their comprehension and recall skills about whatever is read [5]. The impact of summarization in comprehending the text is significant for learners with reading difficulties [2]. As a strategy performed either during or after reading, summarizing helps readers to focus on the main ideas and other key skill concepts that have been taught and to disregard the less relevant ones [6]. Reading comprehension is defined [7] as ¡°the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning.¡± This definition emphasizes on both decoding and
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/acisc/2013/945623/