Lexico-syntactic text simplification for improving information access

文本简化是在保留文本的信息内容和意义的同时，降低文本的语法和词汇复杂性的过程。简化的主要目的是使大量文盲更容易获得信息。英国国家扫盲基金会（www.literacytrust.org.uk）估计，英国有六分之一的成年人读写能力差。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，对文本简化的需求可能会变得更加迫切；例如，由于神经退化和其他原因导致语言障碍的人口日益老龄化，儿童在互联网上获取信息，外行读者试图在网上获取技术文章（可能是为了研究一种疾病或治疗方法）。网上最受欢迎的信息来源之一是维基百科（www.wikipedia.org），这是一个由互联网志愿者合作编写的免费内容百科全书。简体英语维基百科（simple.wikipedia.org）旨在使信息更容易获取，它包含了6万多篇简体英语文章。然而，这些只是英文版维基百科330万篇文章中的一小部分，而且，简化的文章往往很短（通常只有第一段）。我们在这项提议中的目标是双重的。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广泛修订。我们将把这个系统提供给SimpleEnglish维基百科社区，作为扩展简化形式的内容的工具。

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.