Annotating signs of syntactic complexity to support sentence simplification

Abstract

This article presents a new annotation scheme for syntactic complexity in text which has the advantage over other existing syntactic annotation schemes that it is easy to apply, is reliable and it is able to encode a wide range of phenomena. It is based on the notion that the syntactic complexity of sentences is explicitly indicated by signs such as conjunctions, complementisers and punctuation marks. The article describes the annotation scheme developed to annotate these signs and evaluates three corpora containing texts from three genres that were annotated using it. Inter-annotator agreement calculated on the three corpora shows that there is at least "substantial agreement" and motivates directions for future work. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.