Papers Text Simplification

A Sentence Simplification System for Improving Relation Extraction

In this demo paper, we present a text simplification approach that is directed at improving the performance of state-of-the-art Open Relation Extraction (RE) systems. As syntactically complex sentences often pose a chall…

Simplifying the Bible and Wikipedia Using Statistical Machine Translation

I started this work with the hope of generating a text synthesizer (like a musical synthesizer) that can imitate certain linguistic styles. Most of the report focuses on text simplification using statistical machine tran…

LexSubNC: A Dataset of Lexical Substitution for Nominal Compounds

Neural Machine Translation from Simplified Translations

Text simplification aims at reducing the lexical, grammatical and structural complexity of a text while keeping the same meaning. In the context of machine translation, we introduce the idea of simplified translations in…

Vicinity-Driven Paragraph and Sentence Alignment for Comparable Corpora

Parallel corpora have driven great progress in the field of Text Simplification. However, most sentence alignment algorithms either offer a limited range of alignment types supported, or simply ignore valuable clues pres…

Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia

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 readabil…

A Preliminary Study of Statistically Predictive Syntactic Complexity Features and Manual Simplifications in Basque

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of statistically predictive syntactic features of complexity and the treatment of these features by humans when simplifying texts. To that end, we have used a list of the …

Similarity-Based Alignment of Monolingual Corpora for Text Simplification Purposes

Comparable or parallel corpora are beneficial for many NLP tasks. The automatic collection of corpora enables large-scale resources, even for less-resourced languages, which in turn can be useful for deducing rules and p…

Automatic Construction of Large Readability Corpora

This work presents a framework for the automatic construction of large Web corpora classified by readability level. We compare different Machine Learning classifiers for the task of readability assessment focusing on Por…

Quantifying sentence complexity based on eye-tracking measures

Eye-tracking reading times have been attested to reflect cognitive processes underlying sentence comprehension. However, the use of reading times in NLP applications is an underexplored area of research. In this initial …

Understanding the Lexical Simplification Needs of Non-Native Speakers of English

We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives{'} notion of c…

Predicting sentential semantic compatibility for aggregation in text-to-text generation

We examine the task of aggregation in the context of text-to-text generation. We introduce a new aggregation task which frames the process as grouping input sentence fragments into clusters that are to be expressed as a …

Building a Monolingual Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification Using Sentence Similarity Based on Alignment between Word Embeddings

Methods for text simplification using the framework of statistical machine translation have been extensively studied in recent years. However, building the monolingual parallel corpus necessary for training the model req…

Parallel Sentence Compression

Sentence compression is a way to perform text simplification and is usually handled in a monolingual setting. In this paper, we study ways to extend sentence compression in a bilingual context, where the goal is to obtai…

Collecting and Exploring Everyday Language for Predicting Psycholinguistic Properties of Words

Exploring language usage through frequency analysis in large corpora is a defining feature in most recent work in corpus and computational linguistics. From a psycholinguistic perspective, however, the corpora used in th…

Anita: An Intelligent Text Adaptation Tool

We introduce Anita: a flexible and intelligent Text Adaptation tool for web content that provides Text Simplification and Text Enhancement modules. Anita{'}s simplification module features a state-of-the-art system that …

A Customizable Editor for Text Simplification

We present a browser-based editor for simplifying English text. Given an input sentence, the editor performs both syntactic and lexical simplification. It splits a complex sentence into shorter ones, and suggests word su…

Quality Estimation for Language Output Applications

Quality Estimation (QE) of language output applications is a research area that has been attracting significant attention. The goal of QE is to estimate the quality of language output applications without the need of hum…

Joint Copying and Restricted Generation for Paraphrase

Many natural language generation tasks, such as abstractive summarization and text simplification, are paraphrase-orientated. In these tasks, copying and rewriting are two main writing modes. Most previous sequence-to-se…

PaCCSS-IT: A Parallel Corpus of Complex-Simple Sentences for Automatic Text Simplification