In this paper we investigate the task of text simplification for Brazilian Portuguese. Our purpose is three-fold: to introduce a simplification tool for such language and its underlying development methodology, to present an on-line authoring system of simplified text based on the previous tool, and finally to discuss the potentialities of such technology for education. The resources and tools ...

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an important task in lexical simplification and text accessibility. Due to the lack of CWI datasets, previous works largely depend on Simple English Wikipedia and edit histories for obtaining ‘gold standard’ annotations, which are of mixed quality, and limited to English only. We collect complex words/phrases (CP) for English, German and Spanish, annotated b...

Common techniques for acquiring semantic relations rely on static domain and linguistic resources, predefined patterns, and the presence of syntactic cues. We propose a hybrid approach which brings together established and novel techniques in lexical simplification, word disambiguation and association inference for acquiring coarse-grained relations between potentially ambiguous and composite t...

We present a pipelined architecture for a text simplification system and describe our implementation of the three stages— analysis, transformation and regeneration. Our architecture allows each component to be developed and evaluated independently. We lay particular emphasis on the discourse level aspects of syntactic simplification as these are crucial to the process and have not been dealt wi...

Psycholinguistic properties of words have been used in various approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks, such as text simplification and readability assessment. Most of these properties are subjective, involving costly and time-consuming surveys to be gathered. Recent approaches use the limited datasets of psycholinguistic properties to extend them automatically to large lexicons. Howeve...

We introduce Anita: a flexible and intelligent Text Adaptation tool for web content that provides Text Simplification and Text Enhancement modules. Anita’s simplification module features a state-of-the-art system that adapts texts according to the needs of individual users, and its enhancement module allows the user to search for a word’s definitions, synonyms, translations, and visual cues thr...

Advances in text simplification depend on reliable judgments of sentence difficulty. The ability of untrained native English speakers to judge sentence difficulty in the presence of variation in semantic similarity is examined using cloze tests and a forced-choice comparison task. Judgments from participants in web-based experiments demonstrate ability to assess sentence difficulty of professio...