Language technologies applied to document simplification for helping autistic people

•A reading comprehension tool for people with ASD is exposed.•The tool assist people with ASD and careers to simplify texts.•A key element of the tool is the concepts substitution with images.•Figurative language is also simplified for people with ASD.•Summary generation and topic detection are other functions of the tool.

People affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have impairments in social interaction because they lack an adequate theory of mind. A significant percentile has inadequate reading comprehension skills. We present a multilingual tool called Open Book (OB) that applies Human Language Technologies (HLT) in order to identify reading comprehension obstacles in text documents and propose more simple alternatives with the aim of assisting the reading comprehension of users. OB involves several text transformations at lexical, syntactic and semantic level. In this paper we focus on three challenging components of the OB tool: the image retrieval component, the idiom detection component and the summarization module. There are very few studies that involve simplification by showing images associated to difficult concepts. In addition, the treatment of figurative language such as idioms or metaphors is one of the most challenging areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Finally, although text summarization is a more widely studied field in NLP, its application to text simplification remains as an open research issue. Thus, we focus on the integration of these three modules in our OB tool. We present the motivation for building these components and we describe how they are integrated in the whole system. Moreover, the usability and the usefulness of OB have been evaluated and analysed showing that the tool helps to produce texts easier to understand for autistic people.