Lexico-syntactic text simplification for improving information access

Text simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical and lexical complexity of a text, while
retaining its information content and meaning. The main goal of simplification is to make information
more 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 is
therefore a need to make information available in simple English, as advocated by organisations such as
the Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk). This need for text simplification is likely to
become more acute for a variety of reasons; for instance, a growing aging population with language difficulties
arising from neurodegeneration and other causes, children accessing information on the internet or lay
readers 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-content
encyclopedia written collaboratively by internet volunteers. The Simple English Wikipedia
(simple.wikipedia.org) initiative to make information more accessible contains over 60,000 articles in
Simplified English. However, these are only a fraction of the 3.3 million articles in the main English
Wikipedia and further, the simplified articles tend to be very short (often just the first paragraph). Our
goals in this proposal are twofold. From a theoretical perspective we want to gain an understanding of
the text revisions humans perform to simplify text, and learn rules for simplification from corpora. From
an applied perspective, we want to implement a system for automatic text simplification that can perform
the wide range of revisions that humans perform. We will make this system available to the Simple
English Wikipedia community as a tool to expand the content available in simplified form.

We identified the expansion of content available in Simple English Wikipedia (SEW) as an objective. To achieve this we will engage with the SEW community in the last four months of the project and encourage them to edit and revise content that has been automatically created through simplification of existing English Wikipedia articles. We will seek structured user satisfaction feedback and free-text comments about the quality of the texts and level of simplification.

We are also in contact with teachers involved with deaf education. Current UK policy is to integrate deaf children in mainstream schools. This means that individual teachers with deaf students in their class have to prepare simplified material for these students who can suffer from a range of linguistic deficits stemming from lack of early exposure to language. Text simplification is a demanding task, like translation, and school teachers typically do not have any training to do this. We are in contact with educationists involved in deaf education, from a teaching as well as a policy perspective. We will explore the possibility of running our final free recall based evaluation using deaf students (if this is not possible, we will use other participants with language difficulties, such as second language learners).

Society's increasing dependence on online information creates both a challenge (to make information accessible) and an opportunity (to tailor language to the requirements of users). This issue is likely to increase in importance due to a variety of reasons - a growing aging population with language difficulties arising from neurodegeneration and other causes, children accessing information on the internet, lay readers trying to access technical writing online (perhaps, to research an illness or treatment), etc. The National Literacy Trust (www.literacytrust.org.uk) estimates that one in six adults in the UK have poor literacy skills and many organisations, such as the Plain English Campaign (www.plainenglish.co.uk), advocate the need to make information available in simple English. Thus, this research has the potential to positively impact on a large segment of the population.

Given the volume of evidence from cognitive science, psychology and literacy studies supporting the efficacy of text simplification, there has been surprisingly little research on automating the process. This is in stark contrast to other regeneration applications such as summarisation and translation that are well established. There has however been a recent spurt of interest in approaches to text simplification and we believe that this project is timely in that it will spur further research in this field.