Simpatico: Text simplification of Philippine Senate and House Legislations

• Main Authors: Collantes, Miguel Alfonso B., Hipe, Maureen Danielle A., Sorilla, Juan Lorenzo D., Tolentino, Laurenz Adriel C.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2015
• Subjects: Bills, Legislative > Philippines; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/11032
• Institution: De La Salle University

In the Philippines, public participation in the creation of Senate and the House bills is very minimal. This could be the case because of the lack of accessibility of an ordinary citizen to take part in the lawmaking process and the complexity of the terms and grammar rules being used in legal proceedings called legalese. Participation is seen to be a solution to increase public participation but it only solves the process accessibility and not the complexity of the bills. Simplification solves this problem by transforming technical jargons and complicated phrases into words or phrases that are easier to understand. Also, existing simplification systems do not cover Philippine Senate and House bills as part of their domain. Simpatico is a text simplification system that makes us of lexical and syntactic simplification methods in order to simplify legalese to plain English in which a majority of the Philippine population can understand. It makes use or various existing tools in order to carry out tasks like multiword extraction, word sense disambiguation, and sentence parsing. The performance of the system in the simplification of Philippine Senate and House bills was evaluated through measuring the readability, grammaticality, meaning preservation, and the appropriateness of the lexical substitutions in the simplified text. Overall, out of 32 lexical substitutes done by the system across 5 statements in the survey, only 7 or 21.9% of the total lexical simplifications done by were agreed upon by the majority of the experts as an appropriate substitute for the complex words that they are trying to replace. The results of the evaluation also indicate that the lexical substitutions made by the system has greatly affected the readability of the simplified output. Despite being able to preserve the meaning and grammaticality of the statements, the fact that the suggested candidates for substitution were not agreed upon by the experts and the tool used made an impact in initiating division with regards to the readability of the simplified statements produced by the system.