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...

Lexical simplification is the task of automatically reducing the complexity of a text by identifying difficult words and replacing them with simpler alternatives. Whilst this is a valuable application of natural language generation, rudimentary lexical simplification systems suffer from a high error rate which often results in nonsensical, non-simple text. This paper seeks to characterise and q...

the meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. however, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of english...

This paper presents a strategy for syntactic analysis based on the combination of two different parsing techniques: lexical syntactic tagging and phrase structure syntactic parsing. The basic proposal is to take advantage of the good results on lexical syntactic tagging to improve the whole performance of unification-based parsing. The syntactic functions attached to every word by the lexical s...

The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

In this paper we present the results of the analysis of a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts in Spanish, gathered for the purpose of developing an automatic simplification system for this language. The system is intended for individuals with cognitive disabilities who experience difficulties reading and interpreting informative texts. We here concentrate on lexical simplification ...

This study was intended first to categorize the L2 learners in terms of their learning style preferences and second to investigate if their learning preferences are related to lexical inferencing. Moreover, strategies used for lexical inferencing and text related issues of text density and parts of speech were studied to determine their moderating effects and the best predictors of lexical infe...