Project Details
Description / Abstract
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.
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.
| Status | Finished |
|---|---|
| Effective start/end date | 28/02/13 → 31/08/14 |
| Links | https://gtr.ukri.org:443/projects?ref=EP%2FJ018805%2F1 |