Notions of complexity surface in a number of different contexts: In theoretical linguistics, syntactic structures are analyzed in terms of their complexity and constraints such as the complex-NP constraint are formulated on this basis. In cognitive psychology, the complexity involved in cognitively processing language input in human sentence processing is studied. In second language acquisition research, the analysis of complexity is correlated with stages of acquisition (together with accuracy and fluency). On the applied side, complexity measures have long been used to determine the readability of a given text, and some readability measures have recently been automated in computational linguistics.

For several of these notions of complexity, researchers have raised the question how a given text or sentence could be simplified. This includes a range of application contexts, from shortening sentences to make parsing more efficient to making texts accessible to children, second language learners, or people with disabilities.

In this seminar, we will discuss the empirical and conceptual nature of these notions of complexity and explore computational approaches to text simplification building on these.

Nature of course and our expectations: This is a Hauptseminar (and BA thesis seminar) which on the one hand intends to provide an overview of current perspectives and approaches and on the other hand, offers computational linguistics students the opportunity to define and implement a text simplification approach, which typically forms the basis of the term paper or BA thesis project.

Academic conduct and misconduct: Research is driven by discussion and free exchange of ideas, motivations, and perspectives. So you are encouraged to work in groups, discuss, and exchange ideas. At the same time, the foundation of the free exchange of ideas is that everyone is open about where they obtained which information. Concretely, this means you are expected to always make explicit when you’ve worked on something as a team – and keep in mind that being part of a team always means sharing the work.

For text you write, you always have to provide explicit references for any ideas or passages you reuse from somewhere else. Note that this includes text “found” on the web, where you should cite the url of the web site in case no more official publication is available.

Class etiquette: In principle, most of this is obvious, but to be explicit and clear: Please do not read or work on materials for other classes in our seminar. Come to class on time and do not pack up early. All portable electronic devices such as cell phones should be switched off for the entire length of the flight, oops, class. Laptops should not be open in class unless there is a concrete, assigned activity. If for some reason, you must leave early or you have an important call coming in, or you have to miss class for an important reason, please let the instructor know before class.

Note that the following session plan is subject to change; it only constitutes the current state of our planning as the semester unfolds.

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Štajner et al.

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