We describe MUSST, a multilingual syntactic simplification tool. The tool supports sentence simplifications for English, Italian and Spanish, and can be easily extended to other languages. Our implementation includes a set of general-purpose simplification rules, as well as a sentence selection module (to select sentences to be simplified) and a confidence model (to select only promising simpli...

Lexical complexity plays a central role in readability, particularly for dyslexic children and poor readers because of their slow and laborious decoding and word recognition skills. Although some features to aid readability may be common to many languages (e.g., the majority of ’easy’ words are of low frequency), we believe that lexical complexity is mainly language-specific. In this paper, we ...

The automatic identification of discourse relations is still a challenging task in natural language processing. Discourse connectives, such as since or but, are the most informative cues to identify explicit relations; however discourse parsers typically use a closed inventory of such connectives. As a result, discourse relations signaled by markers outside these inventories (i.e. AltLexes) are...

Our DUC2006 system comprised three main components: a task-focused extractive summarization system, sentence simplification, and lexical expansion of topic words. This paper details each of these components, together with experiments designed to quantify their individual contributions. We include an analysis of our results according to two independent human evaluation methods, the NIST evaluati...

We address the problem of simplifying Portuguese texts at the sentence level by treating it as a "translation task". We use the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) framework to learn how to translate from complex to simplified sentences. Given a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts, aligned at the sentence level, we train a standard SMT system and evaluate the "translations" produ...

In this paper we present FLELex, the first graded lexicon for French as a foreign language (FFL) that reports word frequencies by difficulty level (according to the CEFR scale). It has been obtained from a tagged corpus of 777,000 words from available textbooks and simplified readers intended for FFL learners. Our goal is to freely provide this resource to the community to be used for a variety...

Syntactically complex sentences constitute an obstacle for some people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. This paper evaluates a set of simplification rules specifically designed for tackling complex and compound sentences. In total, 127 different rules were developed for the rewriting of complex sentences and 56 for the rewriting of compound sentences. The evaluation assessed the accuracy of th...

In this paper we discuss the degree of readability of historical texts for a broad public. We argue that text simplification methods can improve significantly this aspect and bring an added value to historical texts. We present a specific example, a genuine multilingual historical texts, which should be available at least to researchers from different fields and propose a mechanism for simplify...