RÉSUMÉ La simplification lexicale consiste à remplacer des mots ou des phrases par leur équivalent plus simple. Dans cet article, nous présentons trois modèles de simplification lexicale, fondés sur différents critères qui font qu’un mot est plus simple à lire et à comprendre qu’un autre. Nous avons testé différentes tailles de contextes autour du mot étudié : absence de contexte avec un modèle...

This paper looks at representing paraphrases using the formalism of Synchronous TAGs; it looks particularly at comparisons with machine translation and the modifications it is necessary to make to Synchronous TAGs for paraphrasing. A more detailed version is in Dras (1997a). 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n The context of the paraphrasing in this work is that of Reluctant Paraphrase (Dras, 1997b). In ...

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...

We report on work in progress on extracting lexical simplifications (e.g., “collaborate” → “work together”), focusing on utilizing edit histories in Simple English Wikipedia for this task. We consider two main approaches: (1) deriving simplification probabilities via an edit model that accounts for a mixture of different operations, and (2) using metadata to focus on edits that are more likely ...

The paper presents first results of an ongoing project on text simplification focusing on linguistic metaphors. Based on an analysis of a parallel corpus of news text professionally simplified for different grade levels, we identify six types of simplification choices falling into two broad categories: preserving metaphors or dropping them. An annotation study on almost 300 source sentences wit...

It holds true that a flourishing fieldof Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (Corner, 1996).  Very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 English newspapers: one non-Iranian (The Times) and one ...