Around 10% of the population has dyslexia, a reading disability that negatively affects a person's ability to read and comprehend texts. Previous work has studied how to optimize the text layout, but adapting the text content has not received that much attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that investigates if people with dyslexia would benefit from content simplification. ...

We explore the application of a Deep Structured Similarity Model (DSSM) to ranking in lexical simplification. Our results show that the DSSM can effectively capture fine-grained features to perform semantic matching when ranking substitution candidates, outperforming the stateof-the-art on two standard datasets used for the task.

We describe the English Lexical Simplification task at SemEval-2012. This is the first time such a shared task has been organized and its goal is to provide a framework for the evaluation of systems for lexical simplification and foster research on context-aware lexical simplification approaches. The task requires that annotators and systems rank a number of alternative substitutes – all deemed...

We release the Simple Paraphrase Database, a subset of of the Paraphrase Database (PPDB) adapted for the task of text simplification. We train a supervised model to associate simplification scores with each phrase pair, producing rankings competitive with state-of-theart lexical simplification models. Our new simplification database contains 4.4 million paraphrase rules, making it the largest a...

Lexical simplification has attracted much attention in many languages, which is the process of replacing complex words a given sentence with simpler alternatives equivalent meaning. Although richness vocabulary Chinese makes text very difficult to read for children and non-native speakers, there no research work lexical (CLS) task. To circumvent difficulties acquiring annotations, we manually c...

Automatic lexical simplification via synonym replacement in Swedish was investigated. Three different methods for choosing alternative synonyms were evaluated: (1) based on word frequency, (2) based on word length, and (3) based on level of synonymy. These three strategies were evaluated in terms of standardized readability metrics for Swedish, average word length, and proportion of long words,...

This paper describes part of an ongoing effort to improve the readability of Swedish electronic health records (EHRs). An EHR contains systematic documentation of a single patient’s medical history across time, entered by healthcare professionals with the purpose of enabling safe and informed care. Linguistically, medical records exemplify a highly specialised domain, which can be superficially...

We present the first attempt at using sequence to sequence neural networks to model text simplification (TS). Unlike the previously proposed automated TS systems, our neural text simplification (NTS) systems are able to simultaneously perform lexical simplification and content reduction. An extensive human evaluation of the output has shown that NTS systems achieve almost perfect grammaticality...

We present an approach to text simplification based on synchronous dependency grammars. Our main contributions in this work are (a) a study of how automatically derived lexical simplification rules can be generalised to enable their application in new contexts without introducing errors, and (b) an evaluation of our hybrid system that combines a large set of automatically acquired rules with a ...

Lexical Simplification is the task of modifying the lexical content of complex sentences in order to make them simpler. Due to the lack of reliable resources available for the task, most existing approaches have difficulties producing simplifications which are grammatical and that preserve the meaning of the original text. In order to improve on the state-of-the-art of this task, we propose use...