A Customizable Editor for Text Simplification

John Lee, Wenlong Zhao, Wenxiu Xie


Abstract
We present a browser-based editor for simplifying English text. Given an input sentence, the editor performs both syntactic and lexical simplification. It splits a complex sentence into shorter ones, and suggests word substitutions in drop-down lists. The user can choose the best substitution from the list, undo any inappropriate splitting, and further edit the sentence as necessary. A significant novelty is that the system accepts a customized vocabulary list for a target reader population. It identifies all words in the text that do not belong to the list, and attempts to substitute them with words from the list, thus producing a text tailored for the targeted readers.
Anthology ID:
C16-2020
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editor:
Hideo Watanabe
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
93–97
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-2020
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Lee, Wenlong Zhao, and Wenxiu Xie. 2016. A Customizable Editor for Text Simplification. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, pages 93–97, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
A Customizable Editor for Text Simplification (Lee et al., COLING 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-2020.pdf