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...

Around 10% of the population has dyslexia, a reading disability that negatively affects a person's ability to read and comprehend texts. Previous work has studied how to optimize the text layout, but adapting the text content has not received that much attention. In this paper, we present an eye-tracking study that investigates if people with dyslexia would benefit from content simplification. ...

We explore the application of a Deep Structured Similarity Model (DSSM) to ranking in lexical simplification. Our results show that the DSSM can effectively capture fine-grained features to perform semantic matching when ranking substitution candidates, outperforming the stateof-the-art on two standard datasets used for the task.

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 ...

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...

We describe the English Lexical Simplification task at SemEval-2012. This is the first time such a shared task has been organized and its goal is to provide a framework for the evaluation of systems for lexical simplification and foster research on context-aware lexical simplification approaches. The task requires that annotators and systems rank a number of alternative substitutes – all deemed...

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...

This paper describes part of an ongoing effort to improve the readability of Swedish electronic health records (EHRs). An EHR contains systematic documentation of a single patient’s medical history across time, entered by healthcare professionals with the purpose of enabling safe and informed care. Linguistically, medical records exemplify a highly specialised domain, which can be superficially...