Lexical and syntactic simplification aim to make texts more accessible to certain audiences. Syntactic simplification uses either hand-crafted linguistic rules for deep syntactic transformations, or machine learning techniques to model simpler transformations. Lexical simplification performs a lookup for synonyms followed by context and/or frequency-based models. In this paper we investigate mo...

Parse-tree paths are commonly used to incorporate information from syntactic parses into NLP systems. These systems typically treat the paths as atomic (or nearly atomic) features; these features are quite sparse due to the immense variety of syntactic expression. In this paper, we propose a general method for learning how to iteratively simplify a sentence, thus decomposing complicated syntax ...

We describe two systems for text simplification using typed dependency structures, one that performs lexical and syntactic simplification, and another that performs sentence compression optimised to satisfy global text constraints such as lexical density, the ratio of difficult words, and text length. We report a substantial evaluation that demonstrates the superiority of our systems, individua...

This paper describes our ongoing research project on text simplification for congenitally deaf people. Text simplification we are aiming at is the task of offering a deaf reader a syntactic and lexical paraphrase of a given text for assisting her/him to understand what it means. In this paper, we discuss the issues we should address to realize text simplification and report on the present resul...

The occurrence of syntactic phenomena such as coordination and subordination is characteristic of long, complex sentences. Text simplification systems need to detect and categorise constituents in order to generate simpler sentences. These constituents are typically bounded or linked by signs of syntactic complexity, which include conjunctions, complementisers, whwords, and punctuation marks. T...

This paper investigates non-destructive simplification, a type of syntactic text simplification which focuses on extracting embedded clauses from structurally complex sentences and rephrasing them without affecting their original meaning. This process reduces the average sentence length and complexity to make text simpler. Although relevant for human readers with low reading skills or language ...

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...

SIMPLIFICA is an authoring tool for producing simplified texts in Portuguese. It provides functionalities for lexical and syntactic simplification and for readability assessment. This tool is the first of its kind for Portuguese; it brings innovative aspects for simplification tools in general, since the authoring process is guided by readability assessment based on the levels of literacy of th...