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...

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 ...

Most work on automatic text simplification considers lexical difficulty separate from syntactic simplification. In this study, we use both factors together to predict a variety of sentence changes, including the standard problems of splitting and shortening, as well as expanding to define difficult words that are important to the topic. We leverage a variety of lexical and parse features, as we...

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...

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...