Text Simplification of College Admissions Instructions: A Professionally Simplified and Verified Corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces PSAT, a professionally simplified and verified corpus of college admissions instructions, aimed at reducing language complexity to improve access for minority and bilingual students.

Contribution

The creation of PSAT, a novel, high-quality dataset of simplified college admissions texts with expert verification and sentence alignments for text simplification research.

Findings

First professionally simplified admissions corpus

Contains 112 instructions with 1,883 sentence pairs

Verified by admissions experts

Abstract

Access to higher education is critical for minority populations and emergent bilingual students. However, the language used by higher education institutions to communicate with prospective students is often too complex; concretely, many institutions in the US publish admissions application instructions far above the average reading level of a typical high school graduate, often near the 13th or 14th grade level. This leads to an unnecessary barrier between students and access to higher education. This work aims to tackle this challenge via text simplification. We present PSAT (Professionally Simplified Admissions Texts), a dataset with 112 admissions instructions randomly selected from higher education institutions across the US. These texts are then professionally simplified, and verified and accepted by subject-matter experts who are full-time employees in admissions offices at various institutions. Additionally, PSAT comes with manual alignments of 1,883 original-simplified sentence pairs. The result is a first-of-its-kind corpus for the evaluation and fine-tuning of text simplification systems in a high-stakes genre distinct from existing simplification resources.