Abstract

Making It Simplext: Implementation and Evaluation of a Text Simplification System for Spanish HORACIO SAGGION, Universitat Pompeu Fabra SANJA STAJNER, University of Wolverhampton ¨ STEFAN BOTT, Universitat Stuttgart SIMON MILLE, Universitat Pompeu Fabra LUZ RELLO, Carnegie Mellon University BILJANA DRNDAREVIC, Universitat Pompeu Fabra The way in which a text is written can be a barrier for many people. Automatic text simplification is a natural language processing technology that, when mature, could be used to produce texts that are adapted to the specific needs of particular users. Most research in the area of automatic text simplification has dealt with the English language. In this article, we present results from the Simplext project, which is dedicated to automatic text simplification for Spanish. We present a modular system with dedicated procedures for syntactic and lexical simplification that are grounded on the analysis of a corpus manually simplified for people with special needs. We carried out an automatic evaluation of the system's output, taking into account the interaction between three different modules dedicated to different simplification aspects. One evaluation is based on readability metrics for Spanish and shows that the system is able to reduce the lexical and syntactic complexity of the