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...

Simplified texts are commonly used by teachers and students in bilingual education and other language-learning contexts. These texts are usually manually adapted, and teachers say this is a timeconsuming and sometimes challenging task. Our goal is the development of tools to aid teachers by automatically proposing ways to simplify texts. As a first step, this paper presents a detailed analysis ...

the present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on efl learners’ reading comprehension. eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  zand institute of higher education in shiraz, iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced toefl test constructed by education...

for large and complex reacting systems, computational efficiency becomes a critical issue in process simulation, optimization and model-based control. mechanism simplification is often a necessity to improve computational speed. we present a novel approach to simplification of reaction networks that formulates the model reduction problem as an optimization problem and solves it using genetic al...

For large and complex reacting systems, computational efficiency becomes a critical issue in process simulation, optimization and model-based control. Mechanism simplification is often a necessity to improve computational speed. We present a novel approach to simplification of reaction networks that formulates the model reduction problem as an optimization problem and solves it using geneti...

This paper presents initial research into the use of easy-read articles written for people with cognitive disabilities as a gold standard for the evaluation of the output of text simplification systems. We investigate the compliance of the easyread documents available on the Web with guidelines for development of easyread material, as well as their suitability as a gold standard for simple docu...

The occurrence of syntactic phenomena such as coordination and subordination is characteristic of long, complex sentences. Text simplification systems need to detect and categorise constituents in order to generate simpler sentences. These constituents are typically bounded or linked by signs of syntactic complexity, which include conjunctions, complementisers, whwords, and punctuation marks. T...