Lexical simplification is the task of automatically reducing the complexity of a text by identifying difficult words and replacing them with simpler alternatives. Whilst this is a valuable application of natural language generation, rudimentary lexical simplification systems suffer from a high error rate which often results in nonsensical, non-simple text. This paper seeks to characterise and q...

Text simplification modifies syntax and lexicon to improve the understandability of language for an end user. This survey identifies and classifies simplification research within the period 1998-2013. Simplification can be used for many applications, including: Second language learners, preprocessing in pipelines and assistive technology. There are many approaches to the simplification task, in...

In this paper we present the results of the analysis of a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts in Spanish, gathered for the purpose of developing an automatic simplification system for this language. The system is intended for individuals with cognitive disabilities who experience difficulties reading and interpreting informative texts. We here concentrate on lexical simplification ...

In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguat...

Lexical Simplification is the process of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. This task has wide applicability both as an assistive technology for readers with cognitive impairments or disabilities, such as Dyslexia and Aphasia, and as a pre-processing tool for other Natural Language Processing tasks, such as machine translation and summar...

We present a new context-aware method for lexical simplification that uses two free language resources and real web frequencies. We compare it with the state-of-the-art method for lexical simplification in Spanish and the established simplification baseline, that is, the most frequent synonym. Our method improves upon the other methods in the detection of complex words, in meaning preservation,...

Lexical simplification of scientific terms represents a unique challenge due to the lack of a standard parallel corpora and fast rate at which vocabulary shift along with research. We introduce SimpleScience, a lexical simplification approach for scientific terminology. We use word embeddings to extract simplification rules from a parallel corpora containing scientific publications and Wikipedi...

Text simplification is the process of reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of a text while attempting to preserve (most of) its information content. It has recently emerged as an important research area, which holds promise for enhancing the text readability for the benefit of a broader audience as well as for increasing the performance of other applications. Our work focuses on syntac...

Most work on automatic text simplification considers lexical difficulty separate from syntactic simplification. In this study, we use both factors together to predict a variety of sentence changes, including the standard problems of splitting and shortening, as well as expanding to define difficult words that are important to the topic. We leverage a variety of lexical and parse features, as we...

The complex word identification task refers to the process of identifying difficult words in a sentence from the perspective of readers belonging to a specific target audience. This task has immense importance in the field of lexical simplification. Lexical simplification helps in improving the readability of texts consisting of challenging words. As a participant of the SemEval-2016: Task 11 s...