  Readers find text difficult to consume for many reasons. Summarization can
address some of these difficulties, but introduce others, such as omitting,
misrepresenting, or hallucinating information, which can be hard for a reader
to notice. One approach to addressing this problem is to instead modify how the
original text is rendered to make important information more salient. We
introduce Grammar-Preserving Text Saliency Modulation (GP-TSM), a text
rendering method with a novel means of identifying what to de-emphasize.
Specifically, GP-TSM uses a recursive sentence compression method to identify
successive levels of detail beyond the core meaning of a passage, which are
de-emphasized by rendering words in successively lighter but still legible gray
text. In a lab study (n=18), participants preferred GP-TSM over pre-existing
word-level text rendering methods and were able to answer GRE reading
comprehension questions more efficiently.
