Drug Package Leaflets provide information for patients on how to safely use medicines. European Commission and recent studies stress that further efforts must be made to improve the readability and understandability of package leaflets in order to ensure the proper use of medicines and to increase patient safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly deals with the ...

Lexical Simplification is the task of replacing individual words of a text with words that are easier to understand, so that the text as a whole becomes easier to comprehend, e.g. by people with learning disabilities or by children who learn to read. Although this seems like a straightforward task, evaluating algorithms for this task is not so. The problem is how to build a dataset that provide...

Lexical Simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a text with simpler alternatives. A variety of strategies have been devised for this challenge, yet there has been little effort in comparing their performance. In this contribution, we present a benchmarking of several Lexical Simplification systems. By combining resources created in previous work with automatic spelling and infl...

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.

The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the state-of-art in automatic text simplification. To that end, we present the systems and prototypes according to the language the are built for, their target audience and the type of simplification (syntactic, lexical or both) they perform. Moreover, we expound the di↵erent evaluation methods that have been carried out with these systems and the...

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,...