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 substitutions in drop-down lists. The user can choose the best substitution from the list, undo any inappropriate splitting, and further edit the sentence as necessary. A signific...

We define a calculus for modeling dynamic linking independently of the details of a particular programming environment. The calculus distinguishes at the language level the notions of software configuration and execution, by introducing separate syntactic notions of linkset expression and command, respectively. A reduction step can be either a simplification of a linkset expression, or the exec...

In this paper we examine language modeling for text simplification. Unlike some text-to-text translation tasks, text simplification is a monolingual translation task allowing for text in both the input and output domain to be used for training the language model. We explore the relationship between normal English and simplified English and compare language models trained on varying amounts of t...

This work improves monolingual sentence alignment for text simplification, specifically for text in standard and simple Wikipedia. We introduce a method that improves over past efforts by using a greedy (vs. ordered) search over the document and a word-level semantic similarity score based on Wiktionary (vs. WordNet) that also accounts for structural similarity through syntactic dependencies. E...

This study addresses the automatic simplification of texts in Spanish in order to make them more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. A corpus analysis of original and manually simplified news articles was undertaken in order to identify and quantify relevant operations to be implemented in a text simplification system. The articles were further compared at sentence and text level ...

The paper investigates the problem of sentence readability assessment, which is modelled as a classification task, with a specific view to text simplification. In particular, it addresses two open issues connected with it, i.e. the corpora to be used for training, and the identification of the most effective features to determine sentence readability. An existing readability assessment tool dev...

As a key factor in English grammar checking, subject-verb agreement evaluation plays an important part in assessing translated English texts. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method for subject-verb agreement evaluation on dependency grammars with the processing of phrase syntactic parsing and sentence simplification for subject-verb discovery. Experimental results on patent text show that we...

The Simple English Wikipedia provides a simplified version of Wikipedia's English articles for readers with special needs. However, there are fewer efforts to make information in Wikipedia in other languages accessible to a large audience. This work proposes the use of a syntactic simplification engine with high precision rules to automatically generate a Simple Portuguese Wikipedia on demand, ...

In this paper we discuss the degree of readability of historical texts for a broad public. We argue that text simplification methods can improve significantly this aspect and bring an added value to historical texts. We present a specific example, a genuine multilingual historical texts, which should be available at least to researchers from different fields and propose a mechanism for simplify...

While the automatic analysis of the readability of texts has a long history, the use of readability assessment for text simplification has received only little attention so far. In this paper, we explore readability models for identifying differences in the reading levels of simplified and unsimplified versions of sentences. Our experiments show that a relative ranking is preferable to an absol...