Text simplification for information-seeking applications

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of simplifying natural language texts in order to ease the task of accessing factual information contained in them. We define the notion of Easy Access Sentence - a unit of text from which the information it contains can be retrieved by a system with modest text-analysis capabilities, able to process single verb sentences with named entities as constituents. We present an algorithm that constructs Easy Access Sentences from the input text, with a small-scale evaluation. Challenges and further research directions are then discussed. © Springer-Verlag 2004.