The present study investigated the effect of different types of text simplification (i.e., reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of texts) on reading comprehension of English as a Foreign Language learners (EFL). Sixty female intermediate EFL learners from three intact classes in Tabarestan Language Institute in Tehran participated in the study. The intact classes were assigned to three...

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...

We release the Simple Paraphrase Database, a subset of of the Paraphrase Database (PPDB) adapted for the task of text simplification. We train a supervised model to associate simplification scores with each phrase pair, producing rankings competitive with state-of-theart lexical simplification models. Our new simplification database contains 4.5 million paraphrase rules, making it the largest a...

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We propose a new dataset for evaluating a Japanese lexical simplification method. Previous datasets have several deficiencies. All of them substitute only a single target word, and some of them extract sentences only from newswire corpus. In addition, most of these datasets do not allow ties and integrate simplification ranking from all the annotators without considering the quality. In contras...

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 ...

Lexical Simplification is the task of replacing individual words of a text with words that are easier to understand, so that the text as a whole becomes easier to comprehend, e.g. by people with learning disabilities or by children who learn to read. Although this seems like a straightforward task, evaluating algorithms for this task is not so. The problem is how to build a dataset that provide...

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...