This paper presents three systems that took part in the lexical simplification task at SEMEVAL 2012. Speculating on what the concept of simplicity might mean for a word, the systems apply different approaches to rank the given candidate lists. One of the systems performs second-best (statistically significant) and another one performs third-best out of 9 systems and 3 baselines. Notably, the th...

In recent years, several studies have approached the Text Simplification (TS) task as a machine translation (MT) problem. They report promising results in learning how to translate from ‘original’ to ‘simplified’ language using the standard phrasebased translation model. However, our results indicate that this approach works well only when the training dataset consists mostly of those sentence ...

Text simplification modifies syntax and lexicon to improve the understandability of language for an end user. This survey identifies and classifies simplification research within the period 1998-2013. Simplification can be used for many applications, including: Second language learners, preprocessing in pipelines and assistive technology. There are many approaches to the simplification task, in...