YATS: Yet Another Text Simplifier

Abstract

We present a text simplifier for English that has been built with open source software and has both lexical and syntactic simplification capabilities. The lexical simplifier uses a vector space model approach to obtain the most appropriate sense of a given word in a given context and word frequency simplicity measures to rank synonyms. The syntactic simplifier uses linguistically-motivated rule-based syntactic analysis and generation techniques that rely on part-of-speech tags and syntactic dependency information. Experimental results show good performance of the lexical simplification component when compared to a hard-to-beat baseline, good syntactic simplification accuracy, and according to human assessment, improvements over the best reported results in the literature for a system with same architecture as YATS.