Reducing Text Complexity through Automatic Lexical Simplification: an Empirical Study for Spanish

In this paper we present the results of a study directed towards developing a lexical simplification module of an automatic simplification system for Spanish, intended for readers with cognitive disabilities. We here observe the word length and frequency distribution of two sets of texts that make up our parallel corpus, and we focus on cases of information expansion (through the insertion of definitions)and content reduction (through summarisation). Our ultimate goal is computational implementation of lexical changes in the future.