In this paper we examine language modeling for text simplification. Unlike some text-to-text translation tasks, text simplification is a monolingual translation task allowing for text in both the input and output domain to be used for training the language model. We explore the relationship between normal English and simplified English and compare language models trained on varying amounts of t...

Lexical and syntactic simplification aim to make texts more accessible to certain audiences. Syntactic simplification uses either hand-crafted linguistic rules for deep syntactic transformations, or machine learning techniques to model simpler transformations. Lexical simplification performs a lookup for synonyms followed by context and/or frequency-based models. In this paper we investigate mo...

Simplification of lexically complex texts, by replacing complex words with their simpler synonyms, helps non-native speakers, children, and language-impaired people understand text better. Recent lexical simplification methods rely on manually simplified corpora, which are expensive and time-consuming to build. We present an unsupervised approach to lexical simplification that makes use of the ...

We present a browser-based editor for simplifying English text. Given an input sentence, the editor performs both syntactic and lexical simplification. It splits a complex sentence into shorter ones, and suggests word substitutions in drop-down lists. The user can choose the best substitution from the list, undo any inappropriate splitting, and further edit the sentence as necessary. A signific...

This study examines two possibilities of using the FLELex graded lexicon for the automated assessment of text complexity in French as a foreign language learning. From the lexical frequency distributions described in FLELex, we derive a single level of difficulty for each word in a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts. We then use this data to automatically address the lexical compl...

In this paper we present a readability assessment system for Basque, ErreXail, which is going to be the preprocessing module of a Text Simplification system. To that end we compile two corpora, one of simple texts and another one of complex texts. To analyse those texts, we implement global, lexical, morphological, morpho-syntactic, syntactic and pragmatic features based on other languages and ...

This paper describes SimpLex,1 a Lexical Simplification system that participated in the English Lexical Simplification shared task at SemEval-2012. It operates on the basis of a linear weighted ranking function composed of context sensitive and psycholinguistic features. The system outperforms a very strong baseline, and ranked first on the shared task.