Towards Automatic Lexical Simplification in Spanish: An Empirical Study

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 operations applied by human editors on the basis of which we derive a set of rules to be implemented automatically. We have so far addressed the issue of lexical units substitution, with special attention to reporting verbs and adjectives of nationality; insertion of definitions; simplification of numerical expressions; and simplification of named entities.