This paper intends to contribute research on the simplification hypothesis by incorporating a multi-discourse analysis. The study compares non-specialized and academic specialized discourse with aim of describing their similarities difference in terms syntactic stylistic simplification. Considering two variables (non-specialized/specialized original/translated texts) allows for examination whic...

Several variants of a first-order simplification rule for nonnormal form tableaux using syntactic constraints are presented. These can be used as a framework for porting methods like unit resolution or hyper tableaux to non-normal form free variable tableaux.

In this paper, we describe the system we submitted to the SemEval-2012 Lexical Simplification Task. Our system (mmSystem) combines word frequency with decompositional semantics criteria based on syntactic structure in order to rank candidate substitutes of lexical forms of arbitrary syntactic complexity (oneword, multi-word, etc.) in descending order of (cognitive) simplicity. We believe that t...

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...

Our submission to the CoNLL-2008 shared task (Surdeanu et al., 2008) focused on applying a novel method for semantic role labeling to the shared task. Our system first simplifies each sentence to be labeled using a set of hand-constructed rules; the weights of the system are trained on semantic role labeling data to generate simplifications which are as useful as possible for semantic role labe...

We propose a new method for evaluating the readability of simplified sentences through pair-wise ranking. The validity of the method is established through incorpus and cross-corpus evaluation experiments. The approach correctly identifies the ranking of simplified and unsimplified sentences in terms of their reading level with an accuracy of over 80%, significantly outperforming previous resul...

In an experiment stylistic choices in the new Dutch Bible translation were evaluated. 185 participants evaluated 4 fragments which differed type of variation (lexical or syntactic), source fragment (Bible - classical text) and way variations applied (single mixed). Also religious¬ness evaluator was taken into account. Examined is whether lexical modernization syntactic simplification are same, ...

This paper applies parsing technology to the task of syntactic simplification of English sentences, focusing on the identification of text spans that can be removed from a complex sentence. We report the most comprehensive evaluation to-date on this task, using a dataset of sentences that exhibit simplification based on coordination, subordination, punctuation/parataxis, adjectival clauses, par...

We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives’ notion of complexity and various morphological, semantic and lexical word properties. Some of our findings contradict long-standing misconceptions about word simplicity. The data produced in...