Modern automatic text adaptation often fails to meet the specific needs of targeted readers. The TextAD project aimed to address this gap by creating tailored texts for students with intellectual disability (ID), focusing on their unique challenges. This exploratory study presents findings from three rounds of testing automatic adaptations at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels in expository texts. Reading comprehension, self-reported ratings of comprehension, interest, and perceived difficulty, along with metacognitive insights were assessed with 27 students with ID, refining adaptations based on each iteration's results. While comprehension gains for the adapted versions were not significant overall, promising outcomes appeared with lexical and syntactic adaptations in the later rounds of testing, although group heterogeneity influenced results. Despite reporting high comprehension, students noted persistent difficulty understanding many expository concepts. Alongside evaluating the effects of text adaptations on comprehension and perceived understanding, this paper offers insights into assessment approaches for developing automatic adaptations tailored to this audience.

 We explore three auxiliary techniques for automatic text adaptation (ATA)—epithets for nouns, explanations for keywords, and syllabification—to aid reading for individuals with reading difficulties. In an initial evaluation, we conducted a study with individuals possessing average reading skills. Results indicate that while all three techniques demonstrate high accuracy, their usefulness varies. Epithets were found to be less beneficial, possibly due to the introduction of excessive information, although they may assist certain populations, such as individuals with intellectual disabilities. Keyword explanations were generally helpful and accurate, though occasional inaccuracies arose with rare or domain-specific terms. The effectiveness of syllabification was found to be contingent on the specific words being processed. These findings suggest that while ATA techniques can improve reading accessibility, their varying impacts highlight the need for tailored approaches based on the reader's needs.

We investigate changes in the use of four Swedish words from the fields of design and archi- tecture. It has been suggested that their meanings have been blurred, especially in governmental reports and policy documents, so that distinctions between them that are important to stakeholders in the respective fields are lost. Specifically, we compare usage in two governmental public reports on design, one from 1999 and the other from 2015, and additionally in opinion responses to the 2015 report. Our approach is to contextualise occurrences of the words in different representations of the texts using word embeddings, topic modelling and sentiment analysis. Tools and language resources developed within the SweClarin infrastructure have been crucial for the implementation of the study.

We show how the tools and language resources developed within the SweClarin infrastructure can be used to investigate changes in the use and understanding of the Swedish related words arkitektur, design, form, and formgivning. Specifically, we compare their use in two governmental public reports on design, one from 1999 and the other from 2015. We test the hypothesis that their meaning has developed in a way that blurs distinctions that may be important to stakeholders in the respective fields.

What makes a text easy to read or not, depends on a variety of factors. One of the most prominent is, however, if the text contains easy, and avoids difficult, words. Deciding if a word is easy or difficult is not a trivial task, since it depends on characteristics of the word in itself as well as the reader, but it can be facilitated by the help of a corpus annotated with word frequencies and reading proficiency levels. In this paper, we present NyLLex, a novel lexical resource derived from books published by Swedens largest publisher for easy language texts. NyLLex consists of 6,668 entries, with frequency counts distributed over six reading proficiency levels. We show that NyLLex, with its novel source material aimed at individuals of different reading proficiency levels, can serve as a complement to already existing resources for Swedish.

Program analysis has been developing into a prolific research tradition illustrating the utility of adult education providers and program descriptions as heuristic objects for addressing larger questions of social scientific and humanistic inquiry. In this research tradition, attention has been directed to the way programs and educational offers of adult education providers reflect the changing labour market, educational systems and cultural zeitgeist. In this article, we interrogate the opportunities to deploy large-scale text analysis on the content of the national catalogues of Swedish folk high schools (1954–2007) to further enlarge the analytical depth and precision of how program analysis can address changing educational offerings. Based on an analysis of a comprehensive digital repository we identify the latent thematic structures of educational offers in Swedish folk high schools over time and discuss how these changing course descriptions reflect broader structural changes in its educational system as well as regarding the purpose of adult education.

Die Programmanalyse hat sich zu einer produktiven Forschungstradition entwickelt, die den Nutzen von Anbietern von Erwachsenenbildung und Programmbeschreibungen als heuristische Objekte zur Behandlung größerer Fragen sozialwissenschaftlicher und humanistischer Forschung veranschaulicht. In dieser Forschungstradition wurde die Aufmerksamkeit darauf gerichtet, wie Programme und Bildungsangebote von Erwachsenenbildungsanbietern den Wandel von Arbeitsmarkt, Bildungssystemen und kulturellem Zeitgeist widerspiegeln. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir die Möglichkeiten, großangelegte Textanalysen des Inhalts der Programme der schwedischen Volkshochschulen (1954–2007) einzusetzen, um die analytische Tiefe und Genauigkeit der Programmanalyse für sich ändernde Bildungsangebote weiter zu erhöhen. Basierend auf einer Analyse eines umfassenden digitalen Repositoriums identifizieren wir die latenten thematischen Strukturen von Bildungsangeboten an schwedischen Volkshochschulen im Laufe der Zeit und diskutieren, wie diese sich ändernden Kursbeschreibungen breitere strukturelle Veränderungen im Bildungssystem sowie im Hinblick auf den Zweck der Erwachsenenbildung widerspiegeln.

In a SweClarin cooperation project we apply topic modelling to the texts found with pins in Pin-terest boards. The data in focus are digitisations of Viking Age finds from the Swedish History Museum and the underlying research question is how they are given new contextual meanings in boards. We illustrate how topic modelling can support interpretation of polysemy and culturally situated meanings. It expands on the employment of topic modelling by accentuating the necessity of interpretation in every step of the process from capturing and cleaning the data, to modelling and visualisation. The paper concludes that the national context of digitisations of Viking Age jewellery in the Swedish History Museum’s collection management system is re-placed by several transnational contexts in which Viking Age jewellery is appreciated for its symbolical meanings and decorative functions in contemporary genres for re-imagining, relivingand performing European pasts and mythologies. The emerging contexts on Pinterest also high-light the business opportunities involved in genres such as reenactment, neo-paganism, lajv and fantasy. The boards are clues to how digitisations serve as prototypes for replicas.