Dear Visitor,
This is an attempt to compile and categorize contemporary and past research on text simplificatoin. This list is by no means exhaustive and please contact me if you feel something is missing here. Usually most of these papers can be found if you search by their titles on any decent search engine. If you cannot (and if you have the patience), please let me know.
Note: Most of the papers worked with English texts. Incase of others, the language is indicated in brackets.
Contents
Early research (1940s to early 2000s)
- Chandrasekar, R. Doran, C. and Srinivas, B.; Motivations and Methods for Text Simplification; 1996.
- Chandrasekar, R. and Srinivas, B.; Automatic Induction of Rules for Text Simplification; Upenn, NSF Science and Technology Center for Research in Cognitive Science, 1996.
- Carroll, J.; Minnen, G.; Canning, Y.; Devlin, S. & Tait, J. Practical Simplification of English Newspaper Text to Assist Aphasic Readers Proceedings of the AAAI-98 Workshop on Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technology, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 1998
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- Canning, Y. and Tait, J.; Syntactic Simplification of Newspaper Text for Aphasic Readers; Proceedings of SIGIR-99 Workshop on Customised Information Delivery, 1999, 6-11.
- Canning, Y.; Tait, J.; Archibald, J. and Crawley, R.; Cohesive Generation of Syntactically Simplified Newspaper Text; Third International Workshop on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2000, Brno, Czech Republic, September 13-16, 2000.
- Siddharthan, A.; An Architecture for a Text Simplification System; In Proceedings of the Language Engineering Conference (LEC 2002), 2002.
Corpora Creation
- Barzilay, R. and Elhadad, N.; Sentence alignment for monolingual comparable corpora; Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2003, 25-32.
- Nelkin, R. and Shieber, S. M.; Towards robust context-sensitive sentence alignment for monolingual corpora; In 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 2006.
- Caseli, H.; Pereira, T.; Specia, L.; Pardo, T.; Gasperin, C. and Aluísio, S.; Building a Brazilian Portuguese parallel corpus of original and simplified texts; In Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics (CICLing-2009), 2009. (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Bott, S. and Saggion, H.; An Unsupervised Alignment Algorithm for Text Simplification Corpus Construction; ACL Workshop on Monolingual Text-to-Text Generation, 2011.
- Klerke, S. and Søgaard, A.; Danish parallel corpus for text simplification; In Proceedings of Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 2012.
- Rello, L.; Baeza-Yates, R.; Saggion, H. and Pedler, J.; A First Approach to the Creation of a Spanish Corpus of Dyslexic Texts; Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility, 2012.
- Klaper, D.; Ebling, S. and Volk, M.; Building a German/Simple German Parallel Corpus for Automatic Text Simplification; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (PITR), 2013.
- Collados, J. C.; Splitting Complex Sentences for Natural Language Processing for Applications: Building a Simplified Spanish Corpus; Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences; Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Studies. Current Challenges and Future Directions: Selected Papers from the 5th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics (CILC2013), 2013, 95, 464-472.
Simplification as Translation
- Specia, L.; Translating from complex to simplified sentences; Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR'10), 2010.
- Zhu, Z.; Bernhard, D. and Gurevych, I.; A Monolingual Tree-based Translation Model for Sentence Simplification; Proceedings of The 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), August 2010. Beijing, China, 2010.
- Coster, W. and Kauchak, D.; Simple English Wikipedia: A New Text Simplification Task; Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011, 665-669.
- Coster, W. and Kauchak, D.; Learning to Simplify Sentences Using Wikipedia; Proceedings of the Workshop on Monolingual Text-To-Text Generation, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011, 1-9.
- De Belder, J. and Moens, M.-F.; A dataset for the evaluation of lexical simplification; Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012, 7182, 426-437.
- Wubben, S.; van den Bosch, A. and Krahmer, E.; Sentence Simplification by Monolingual Machine Translation; Proceedings of ACL 2012, 2012.
- Feblowitz, D. and Kauchak, D.; Sentence Simplification as Tree Transduction; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (PITR), 2013.
- Kauchak, D.; Improving Text Simplification Language Modeling Using Unsimplified Text Data; Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2013.
Lexical Simplification
- Yatskar, M.; Pang, B.; Niculescu-Mizil, C. D. and Lee, L.; For the sake of simplicity: Unsupervised extraction of lexical simplifications from Wikipedia; Proceedings of the NAACL, 2010, 365-368.
- Biran, O.; Brody, S. and Elhadad, N.; Putting it Simply: a Context-Aware Approach to Lexical Simplification; Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011, 496-501.
- Walker, A.; Siddharthan, A. and Starkey, A.; Investigation into Human Preference between Common and Unambiguous Lexical Substitutions; Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG), Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011, 176-180.
- Amoia, M. and Romanelli, M.; SB: mmSystem - Using Decompositional Semantics for Lexical Simplification; In Proceedings of First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM), 2012.
- Bott, S.; Rello, L.; Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H.; Can Spanish Be Simpler? LexSiS: Lexical Simplification for Spanish; In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2012.
- Drndarevic, B.; Stajner, S. and Saggion, H.; Reporting Simply: A Lexical Simplification Strategy for Enhancing Text Accessibility; Proceedings of "Easy to read on the web" online symposium, 2012.
- Jauhar, S. K. and Specia, L.; UOW-SHEF: SimpLex – Lexical Simplicity Ranking based on Contextual and Psycholinguistic Features; In proceedings of the First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM), 2012.
- Johannsen, A.; Martinez, H.; Klerke, S. and Søgaard, A.; EMNLP@CPH: Is frequency all there is to simplicity?; First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), 2012.
- Keskisärkkä, R. & Jönsson, A.; Automatic Text Simplification via Synonym Replacement; In Proceedings of The Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference, 2012.
- Ligozat, A.-L.; Grouin, C.; Garcia-Fernandez, A. and Bernhard., D.; ANNLOR: A Naive Notation system for Lexical Outputs Ranking In English Lexical Simplification; Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation, 2012.
- Sinha, R.; UNT-SIMPRANK: Systems for Lexical Simplification Ranking; In Proceedings of First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (SEM), 2012.
- Specia, L.; Jauhar, S. K. and Mihalcea, R.; Semeval-2012 task 1: English lexical simplification; In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2012), 2012.
- Thomas, S. R. and Anderson, S.; WordNet-based lexical simplification of a document; Proceedings of KONVENS 2012.
- Shardlow, M.; A Comparison of Techniques to Automatically Identify Complex Words; Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, 2013.
Other approaches to Simplification
- Damay et.al.; SIMTEXT: Text Simplification of Medical Literature; 3rd National Natural Language Processing Symposium - Building Language Tools and Resources, 2006.
- Devlin, S. and Unthank, G.; Helping aphasic people process online information; Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, ACM, 2006, 225-226.
- Gasperin, C.; Maziero, E.; Specia, L.; T.S.P., P. and Aluisio, S.; Natural language processing for social inclusion: a text simplification architecture for different literacy levels; XXXVI Seminário Integrado de Software e Hardware (SEMISH-2009), 2009, 387-401.
- Jonnalagadda, S.; Tari, L.; Hakenberg, J.; Baral, C. and Gonzalez, G.; Towards Effective Sentence Simplification for Automatic Processing of Biomedical Text; Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2009, Boulder, USA, June, 2009.
- Kandula, S.; Curtis, D. and Zeng-Treitler, Q.; A semantic and syntactic text simplification tool for health content; In Proceedings of AMIA Annual Symposium, 2010.
- Napoles, C. and Dredze, M.; Learning simple Wikipedia: a cogitation in ascertaining abecedarian language; Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Writing: Writing Processes and Authoring Aids, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010, 42-50.
- Junior, A. C.; Copestake, A.; Specia, L. and Aluísio, S. M.; Towards an on-demand Simple Portuguese Wikipedia; Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies, 2011.
- Siddharthan, A.; Text Simplification using Typed Dependencies: A Comparison of the Robustness of Different Generation Strategies; Proceedings of the 13th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG), 2011.
- Smith, C. and Jönsson, A.; Automatic Summarization As Means Of Simplifying Texts, An Evaluation For Swedish; Proceedings of the 18th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics NODALIDA 2011.
- Woodsend, K. and Lapata, M.; Learning to Simplify Sentences with Quasi-Synchronous Grammar and Integer Programming; Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2011.
- Woodsend, K. and Lapata, M.; WikiSimple: Automatic Simplification of Wikipedia Articles; In Proceedings of the 25th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2011.
- Aranzabe, M. J.; de Ilarraza, A. D. and Gonzalez-Dios, I.; First Approach to Automatic Text Simplification in Basque; Proceedings of the First worshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA), 2012. (Basque)
- Aranzabe, M. J.; de Ilarraza, A. D. and Gonzalez-Dios, I.; Transforming Complex Sentences using Dependency Trees for Automatic Text Simplification in Basque; SEPLN Journal, 2012. (Basque)
- Bott, S.; Saggion, H. and Figueroa, D.; A Hybrid System for Spanish Text Simplification; NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT), 2012.
- Seretan, V.; Acquisition of Syntactic Simplification Rules for French; Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), 2012.
- Bautista, S.; Hervas, R.; Gervas, P.; Power, R. and Williams, S.; A System for the Simplification of Numerical Expressions at Different Levels of Understandability; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility, 2013.
- Klerke, S. and Søgaard, A.; Simple, readable sub-sentences; Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, 2013.
Handling Discourse issues
- Siddharthan, A.; Resolving Attachment and Clause Boundary Ambiguities for Simplifying Relative Clause Constructs; Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop, 40th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002), 2002.
- Siddharthan, A. and Copestake, A.; Generating Anaphora for Simplifying Text; Proceedings of the 4th Discourse Anaphora and Anaphor Resolution Colloquium (DAARC 2002), 2002.
- Siddharthan, A.; Preserving Discourse Structure when Simplifying Text; Proceedings of the European Natural Language Generation Workshop (ENLG), 2003.
- Williams, S.; Reiter, E. and Osman, L. M.; Experiments With Discourse-Level Choices and Readability; In Proceedings of the European Natural Language Generation Workshop (ENLG), 2003.
- Siddharthan, A.; Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion; Research on Language and Computation, 2006, 4, 77-109.
Identifying Targets for Text Simplification, Readability Assessment's role etc.,
- Aluisio, S.; Specia, L.; Gasperin, C. and Scarton, C.; Readability Assessment for Text Simplification; 2007. (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Alusio, S. M.; Specia, L.; Pardo, T. A.; Maziero, E. G. and Fortes, R. P.; Towards Brazilian Portuguese automatic text simplification systems; Proceeding of the eighth ACM symposium on Document engineering, 2008, 240-248. (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Gasperin, C.; Specia, L.; Pereira, T. F. and Aluisio, S. M.; Learning When to Simplify Sentences for Natural Text Simplification; Encontro Nacional de Inteligência Artificial (ENIA-2009), 2009.
- Medero, J. and Ostendorf, M.; Identifying Targets for Syntactic Simplification; ISCA International Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE 2011), 2011.
- Dornescu, I.; Evans, R. and Orasan, C. A Tagging Approach to Identify Complex Constituents for Text Simplification Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 2013, 221-229.
- Kauchak, D.; Mouradi, O.; Pentoney, C. & Leroy, G.; Text Simplification Tools: Using Machine Learning to Discover Features that Identify Difficult Text. 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), 2014.
Evaluation of Simplification
- Margarido, P. R. A.; Pardo, T. A. S.; Antonio, G. M.; Fuentes, V. B.; Aires, R.; Aluísio, S. M. and Fortes, R. P. M.; Automatic summarization for text simplification: evaluating text understanding by poor readers; WebMedia '08 Companion Proceedings of the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web, 2008.
- Drndarevic, B.; Stajner, S.; Bott, S.; Bautista, S. and Saggion, H.; Automatic Text Simplification in Spanish: A Comparative Evaluation of Complementing Modules; In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, 2013.
- Shardlow, M.; The CW Corpus: A New Resource for Evaluating the Identification of Complex Words; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (PITR), 2013.
- Temnikova, I. and Maneva, G.; The C-Score – Proposing a Reading Comprehension Metrics as a Common Evaluation Measure for Text Simplification; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (PITR), 2013.
- Sanja Stajner and Horaccio Saggion; Readability Indices for Automatic Evaluation of Text SimplificationSystems: A Feasibility Study for Spanish; Proceedings of IJCNLP 2013.
Corpus studies, discussions, surveys, SLA perspectives etc.,
- Evans, R. V.; The Effect of Transformational Simplification on the Reading Comprehension of Selected High School Students; Journal of Literacy Research, 1972.
- Blum, S. and Levenston, E. A.; Universals of Lexical Simplification; Language Learning, 1978, 28, 399-415.
- Blum, S. and Levenston, E.; Lexical Simplification in Second language Acquisition; Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1980, 2, 43-63.
- Walmsley, S. A.; Scott, K. M. and Lehrer, R.; Effects of Document Simplification on the Reading Comprehension of the Elderly; Journal of Literacy Research, 1981.
- Petersen, S. E. and Ostendorf, M.; Text Simplification for Language Learners: A Corpus Analysis; Speech and Language Technology for Education (SLaTE), 2007.
- Feng, L.; Text Simplification: A Survey; CUNY, 2008.
- Allen, D.; A study of the role of relative clauses in the simplification of news texts for learners of English; System, 2009, 37, 58-599.
- Allen, D.; Using a corpus of simplified news texts to investigate features of the intuitive approach to simplification; Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference 2009, 2009.
- Gasperin, C.; Maziero, E. and Aluısio, S. M.; Challenging Choices for Text Simplification; Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, 2010.
- Bott, S. and Saggion, H.; Spanish Text Simplification: An Exploratory Study; 27th CONFERENCE OF THE SPANISH SOCIETY FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, 2011.
- Crossley, S. A.; Allen, D. and McNamara, D. S.; Text simplification and comprehensible input: A case for an intuitive approach; Language Teaching Research, 2012, 16.
- Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H.; Towards Automatic Lexical Simplification in Spanish: An Empirical Study; Proceedings of the First Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for target reader populations, Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012, 8-16.
- Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H.; Reducing Text Complexity through Automatic Lexical Simplification: an Empirical Study for Spanish; The Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN), 2012, 49.
- Eskenazi, M.; Lin, Y. and Saz, O.; Tools for Non-native Readers: the Case for Translation and Simplification; Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility, 2013.
- Heydari, M.; Khodabandehlou, M. and Jahandar, S.; On the Effectiveness of Strategy based Instruction of Textual Simplification on EFL Learner's Reading Comprehension Ability; Indian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Life Sciences, 2013, 3, 176-183.
- Stajner, S.; Drndarevic, B. and Saggion, H.; Corpus-based Sentence Deletion and Split Decisions for Spanish Text Simplification; CICLing 2013: The 14th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, 2013.
- Stajner, S. and Saggion, H.; Adapting Text Simplification Decisions to Different Text Genres and Target Users; SEPLN Journal, 2013, 51, 135-142.
- Candido, Jr., A.; Maziero, E.; Gasperin, C.; Pardo, T. A. S.; Specia, L. and Aluisio, S. M.; Supporting the adaptation of texts for poor literacy readers: a text simplification editor for Brazilian Portuguese; Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, 2009, 34-42. (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Jonnalagadda, S. and Gonzalez, G.; BioSimplify: an open source sentence simplification engine to improve recall in automatic biomedical information extraction; AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2010.
- Bott, S.; Saggion, H. and Mille, S.; Text Simplification Tools for Spanish; Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), 2012.
- Barlacchi, G. and Tonelli, S.; ERNESTA: A Sentence Simplification Tool for Children's Stories in Italian; 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing 2013.
Applications
- Lal, P. and Rüger, S.; Extract-based Summarization with Simplification; In Proceedings of Document Understanding Conference (DUC) 2002.
- Inui, K.; Fujita, A.; Takahashi, T.; Iida, R. and Iwakura, T.; Text Simplification for Reading Assistance: A Project Note; Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Paraphrasing, held at ACL 2003, 2003.
- Advaith Siddharthan, A. N. and McKeown, K.; Syntactic Simplification for Improving Content Selection in Multi-Document Summarization; Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2004), 2004.
- Daelemans, W.; Höthker, A. and Sang, E. T. K.; Automatic Sentence Simplification for Subtitling in Dutch and English; In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), 2004.
- Klebanov, B. B.; Knight, K. and Marcu, D.; Text Simplification for Information-Seeking Applications; On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 2004, 735-747.
- Blake, C.; Kampov, J.; Orphanides, A. K.; West, D. and Lown, C.; UNC-CH at DUC 2007: Query Expansion, Lexical Simplification and Sentence Selection Strategies for Multi-Document Summarization; Proceedings of Document Understanding Conference, 2007.
- Jonnalagadda, S. and Gonzalez, G.; Sentence Simplification Aids Protein-Protein Interaction Extraction; Proceedings of The 3rd International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine, Jeju Island, South Korea, November 8-10, 2009.
- Lu, L. and Parameswaran, N.; Sentence Simplification Based Ontology Mapping; Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International FLAIRS Conference, 2009.
- Belder, J. D. and Moens, M.-F.; Text Simplification For Children; SIGIR workshop on accessible search systems, 2010.
- Heilman, M. and Smith, N.; Extracting Simplified Statements for Factual Question Generation; In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Question Generation, 2010.
- Miwa, M.; Sætre, R.; Miyao, Y. and Tsujii, J.; Entity-Focused Sentence Simplification for Relation Extraction; Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Coling), 2010.
- J.Evans, R.; Comparing methods for the syntactic simplification of sentences in information extraction; Literary and Linguistic Computing, Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Tur, G.; Hakkani-Tür, D.; Heck, L. and Parthasarathy, S.; Sentence simplification for spoken language understanding; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2011, 2011.
Various Theses related to Text Simplification
- Devlin, S.; Simplifying Natural Language for Aphasic Readers; PhD Thesis-University of Sunderland, 1999.
- Urano, K.; Lexical Simplification and Elaboration: Sentence Comprehension and Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition; University of Hawaii, 2000.
- Canning, Y.; Syntactic Simplification of Text; University of Sunderland, 2002.
- Siddharthan, A.; Syntactic simplification and text cohesion; University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, 2004.
- Keskisärkkä, R.; Automatic Text Simplification via Synonym Replacement; Masters Thesis-Linköping University, 2012.
- Klerke, S.; Automatic Text Simplification in Danish: Sampling a restricted space of rewrites to optimize readability using lexical substitutions and dependency analyses; Masters Thesis-University of Copenhagen, 2012.
- Temnikova, I.; Text Complexity and Text Simplification in the Crisis Management domain; PhD Thesis-University of Wolverhampton, UK, 2012.