Experimental Identification of the Use of Hedges in the Simplification of Numerical Expressions

Numerical information is very common in all kinds of documents from newspapers and magazines to household bills and wage slips. However, many people find it difficult to understand, particularly people with poor education and disabilities. Sometimes numerical information is presented with hedges that modify the meaning. A numerical hedge is a word or phrase employed to indicate explicitly that some loss of precision has taken place (e.g., “around”) and it may also indicate the direction of approximation (e.g., “more than”). This paper presents a study of the use of numerical hedges that is part of research investigating the process of rewriting difficult numerical expressions in simpler ways. We carried out a survey in which experts in numeracy were asked to simplify a range of proportion expressions and analysed the results to obtain guidelines for automating the simplification task.