Text simplification using synchronous dependency grammars: Generalising automatically harvested rules

Abstract

We present an approach to text simplification based on synchronous dependency grammars. Our main contributions in this work are (a) a study of how automatically derived lexical simplification rules can be generalised to enable their application in new contexts without introducing errors, and (b) an evaluation of our hybrid system that combines a large set of automatically acquired rules with a small set of hand-crafted rules for common syntactic simplification. Our evaluation shows significant improvements over the state of the art, with scores comparable to human simplifications.