We present an approach to text simplification based on synchronous dependency grammars. Our main contributions in this work are (a) a study of how automatically derived lexical simplification rules can be generalised to enable their application in new contexts without introducing errors, and (b) an evaluation of our hybrid system that combines a large set of automatically acquired rules with a ...

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...

Most recent sentence simplification systems use basic machine translation models to learn lexical and syntactic paraphrases from a manually simplified parallel corpus. These methods are limited by the quality and quantity of manually simplified corpora, which are expensive to build. In this paper, we conduct an indepth adaptation of statistical machine translation to perform text simplification...

We present the first attempt at using sequence to sequence neural networks to model text simplification (TS). Unlike the previously proposed automated TS systems, our neural text simplification (NTS) systems are able to simultaneously perform lexical simplification and content reduction. An extensive human evaluation of the output has shown that NTS systems achieve almost perfect grammaticality...

Lexical Simplification is the task of modifying the lexical content of complex sentences in order to make them simpler. Due to the lack of reliable resources available for the task, most existing approaches have difficulties producing simplifications which are grammatical and that preserve the meaning of the original text. In order to improve on the state-of-the-art of this task, we propose use...

We propose a method for acquiring plain lexical paraphrase using a Japanese dictionary in order to achieve lexical simplification for children. The proposed method extracts plain words that are the most similar to the headword from the dictionary definition. The definition statements describe the headword using plain words; therefore, paraphrasing by replacing the headword with the most similar...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to readability assessment with a specific view to the task of text simplification: the intended audience includes people with low literacy skills and/or with mild cognitive impairment. READ–IT represents the first advanced readability assessment tool for what concerns Italian, which combines traditional raw text features with lexical, morpho-syntactic an...

Lexical Simplification consists in replacing complex words in a text with simpler alternatives. We introduce LEXenstein, the first open source framework for Lexical Simplification. It covers all major stages of the process and allows for easy benchmarking of various approaches. We test the tool’s performance and report comparisons on different datasets against the state of the art approaches. T...

We introduce a bootstrapping algorithm for regression that exploits word embedding models. We use it to infer four psycholinguistic properties of words: Familiarity, Age of Acquisition, Concreteness and Imagery and further populate the MRC Psycholinguistic Database with these properties. The approach achieves 0.88 correlation with humanproduced values and the inferred psycholinguistic features ...