Text simplification for children

The goal in this paper is to automatically transform text into a simpler text, so that it is easier to understand by children. We perform syntactic simplification, i.e. the splitting of sentences, and lexical simplification, i.e. replacing difficult words with easier synonyms. We test the performance of this approach for each component separately on a per sentence basis, and globally with the automatic construction of simplified news articles and encyclopedia articles. By including information from a language model in the lexical simplification step, we obtain better results over a baseline method. The syntactic simplification shows that some phenomena are difficult to recognize by a parser, and that errors are often introduced. Although the reading difficulty goes down, it still doesn’t reach the required level for young children.