Lexico-syntactic text simplification for improving information access

语篇简化是指在保留语篇信息内容和意义的同时，降低语篇语法和词汇复杂性的过程。简化的主要目标是使信息更容易为大量识字率较低的人所获取。国家扫盲信托基金（www.literacytrust.org.uk）估计，英国六分之一的成年人识字能力差。因此，有必要像“简明英语运动”（www.plainenglish.co.uk）等组织所倡导的那样，用简单的英语提供信息。由于各种原因，这种对文本简化的需求可能会变得更加迫切;例如，由于神经退行性疾病和其他原因导致的语言困难，儿童在互联网上访问信息或外行读者试图在线访问技术写作（也许是为了研究疾病或治疗）。最流行的在线信息来源之一是维基百科（www.wikipedia.org），一个由互联网志愿者合作编写的免费内容的百科全书。简化英语维基百科（simple.wikipedia.org）旨在使信息更容易获取，其中包含60，000多篇简化英语文章。然而，这些只是主要英文维基百科中330万篇文章的一小部分，而且简化的文章往往很短（通常只有第一段）。我们在这项建议中有两个目标。从理论的角度来看，我们希望了解人类为简化文本而进行的文本修改，并从语料库中学习简化规则。从应用的角度来看，我们希望实现一个自动文本简化系统，它可以执行人类执行的各种修订。我们将把这个系统提供给SimpleEnglish Wikipedia社区，作为一个工具来扩展简化形式的内容。

Text simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical and lexical complexity of a text, whileretaining its information content and meaning. The main goal of simplification is to make informationmore accessible to the large numbers of people with reduced literacy. The National Literacy Trust(www.literacytrust.org.uk) estimates that one in six adults in the UK have poor literacy skills. There istherefore a need to make information available in simple English, as advocated by organisations such asthe Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk). This need for text simplification is likely tobecome more acute for a variety of reasons; for instance, a growing aging population with language difficultiesarising from neurodegeneration and other causes, children accessing information on the internet or layreaders trying to access technical writing online (perhaps, to research an illness or treatment). One of the most popular information sources online is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), a free-contentencyclopedia written collaboratively by internet volunteers. The Simple English Wikipedia(simple.wikipedia.org) initiative to make information more accessible contains over 60,000 articles inSimplified English. However, these are only a fraction of the 3.3 million articles in the main EnglishWikipedia and further, the simplified articles tend to be very short (often just the first paragraph). Ourgoals in this proposal are twofold. From a theoretical perspective we want to gain an understanding ofthe text revisions humans perform to simplify text, and learn rules for simplification from corpora. Froman applied perspective, we want to implement a system for automatic text simplification that can performthe wide range of revisions that humans perform. We will make this system available to the SimpleEnglish Wikipedia community as a tool to expand the content available in simplified form.