The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the state-of-art in automatic text simplification. To that end, we present the systems and prototypes according to the language the are built for, their target audience and the type of simplification (syntactic, lexical or both) they perform. Moreover, we expound the di↵erent evaluation methods that have been carried out with these systems and the...

This study explores the possibility of replacing the costly and time-consuming human evaluation of the grammaticality and meaning preservation of the output of text simplification (TS) systems with some automatic measures. The focus is on six widely used machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics and their correlation with human judgements of grammaticality and meaning preservation in text sni...

This paper addresses the problem of automatic evaluation of text simplification systems for Spanish. We test whether already-existing readability formulae would be suitable for this task. We adapt three existing readability indices (two measuring lexical complexity and one measuring syntactic complexity) to be computed automatically, which are then applied to a corpus of original news texts and...

Medical texts can be difficult to understand for laymen, due to a frequent occurrence of specialised medical terms. Replacing these difficult terms with easier synonyms can, however, lead to improved readability. In this study, we have adapted a method for assessing difficulty of words to make it more suitable to medical Swedish. The difficulty of a word was assessed not only by measuring the f...

This paper presents work in progress towards automatic recognition and classification of comparisons and similes. Among possible applications, we discuss the place of this task in text simplification for readers with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), who are known to have deficits in comprehending figurative language. We propose an approach to comparison recognition through the use of syntactic ...

In this demo paper, we present a text simplification approach that is directed at improving the performance of state-of-the-art Open Relation Extraction (RE) systems. As syntactically complex sentences often pose a challenge for current Open RE approaches, we have developed a simplification framework that performs a pre-processing step by taking a single sentence as input and using a set of syn...

In this study automatic lexical simplification via synonym replacement in Swedish was investigated using three different strategies for choosing alternative synonyms: based on word frequency, based on word length, and based on level of synonymy. These strategies were evaluated in terms of standardized readability metrics for Swedish, average word length, proportion of long words, and in relatio...

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 this paper, we explore statistical machine translation (SMT) approaches to automatic text simplification (ATS) for Spanish. First, we compare the performances of the standard phrase-based (PB) and hierarchical (HIERO) SMT models in this specific task. In both cases, we build two models, one using the TS corpus with “light” simplifications and the other using the TS corpus with “heavy” simpli...

In this paper, we examine children stories and propose a text simplification system to automatically generate simpler versions of the stories and, therefore, make them easier to understand for children, especially ones with difficulty in reading comprehension. Our system learns simplifications from limited data built from a small repository of short English stories for children and can perform ...