this study was intended first to categorize the l2 learners in terms of their learning style preferences and second to investigate if their learning preferences are related to lexical inferencing. moreover, strategies used for lexical inferencing and text related issues of text density and parts of speech were studied to determine their moderating effects and the best predictors of lexical infe...

In this pa per we present an automatic text simplification system for Spanish which intends to make texts more accessible for users with cognitive disabilities. This system aims at reducing the structural complexity of Spanish sentences in that it converts complex sentences in two or more simple sentences and therefore reduces reading difficulty.

In this paper we discuss particular choices we made during the development of a rule-based syntactic text simplification system. Such choices concern 1) how to deal with adverbial phrases in order to simplify sentences, and 2) the order in which to apply our set of simplification rules. Adverbial phrases have not been considered by previous work on text simplification, but have a considerable i...

Comprehending lyrics, as found in songs and poems, can pose a challenge to human and machine readers alike. This motivates the need for systems that can understand the ambiguity and jargon found in such creative texts, and provide commentary to aid readers in reaching the correct interpretation. We introduce the task of automated lyric annotation (ALA). Like text simplification, a goal of ALA i...

This paper examines the usefulness of semantic features based on word alignments for estimating the quality of text simplification. Specifically, we introduce seven types of alignment-based features computed on the basis of word embeddings and paraphrase lexicons. Through an empirical experiment using the QATS dataset (Štajner et al., 2016b), we confirm that we can achieve the state-of-the-art ...

Text simplification involves restructuring sentences by replacing particular syntactic constructs (like embedded clauses and appositives). The aim is to make the text easier to read for some target group (like aphasics and people with low reading ages) or easier to process by some program (like a parser or machine translation system). However, sentencelevel syntactic restructuring can wreak hav...

In recent years, several studies have approached the Text Simplification (TS) task as a machine translation (MT) problem. They report promising results in learning how to translate from ‘original’ to ‘simplified’ language using the standard phrasebased translation model. However, our results indicate that this approach works well only when the training dataset consists mostly of those sentence ...

There has been a considerable suggestion in the literature that syntactic adaptation of a text would simplify it. This empirical study determined that the complexity of the syntax does not significantly affect the level of reading comprehension. While a complete conceptual and lexical analysis may be necessary for reading comprehension, a thorough syntactic analysis is not. This should be true ...