In this paper we explore the possibility of defining an original pattern structure for managing syntactic trees. More precisely, we are interested in the extraction of relations such as drug-drug interactions (DDIs) in medical texts where sentences are represented as syntactic trees. In this specific pattern structure, called STPS, the similarity operator is based on rooted tree intersection. M...

Independence – the study of what is relevant to a given problem of reasoning – has received an increasing attention from the AI community. In this paper, we consider two basic forms of independence, namely, a syntactic one and a semantic one. We show features and drawbacks of them. In particular, while the syntactic form of independence is computationally easy to check, there are cases in which...

The phenomenon of word order freedom plays an important role in syntactic analysis of many natural languages. This paper introduces a notion of a word order shift, an operation reflecting the degree of word order freedom of natural languages. The word order shift is an operation based upon word order changes preserving syntactic correctness, individual word forms, their morphological characteri...

We have constructed two research resources of Japanese lexical simplification. One is a simplification system that supports reading comprehension of a wide range of readers, including children and language learners. The other is a dataset for evaluation that enables open discussions with other systems. Both the system and the dataset are made available providing the first such resources for the...

Drug Package Leaflets provide information for patients on how to safely use medicines. European Commission and recent studies stress that further efforts must be made to improve the readability and understandability of package leaflets in order to ensure the proper use of medicines and to increase patient safety. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly deals with the ...

This paper proposes a system to automatically summarise news articles in a manner suitable for children by deriving and combining statistical ratings for how important, positively oriented and easy to read each sentence is. Our results demonstrate that this approach succeeds in generating summaries that are suitable for children, and that there is further scope for combining this extractive app...

We have recently made significant changes to the BBN DELPHI syntactic and semantic analysis component. These goal of these changes was to maintain the fight coupling between syntax and semantics characteristic of earlier versions of DELPHI, while making it possible for the system to provide useful semantic interpretations of input for which complete syntactic analysis is impossible. Semantic in...

Lexical Simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a text with simpler alternatives. A variety of strategies have been devised for this challenge, yet there has been little effort in comparing their performance. In this contribution, we present a benchmarking of several Lexical Simplification systems. By combining resources created in previous work with automatic spelling and infl...

According to the official adult literacy report conducted in 24 highly-developed countries, more than 50% adults, on average, can only understand basic vocabulary, short sentences, and syntactic constructions. Everyday information found news articles is thus inaccessible many people, impeding their social inclusion informed decision-making. Systems for automatic sentence simplification aim prov...