Simplification-induced transformations: typology and some characteristics

AbstractThe purpose of automatic text simplification is to transform technical or difficult to understand texts into a more friendly version. The semantics must be preserved during this transformation. Automatic text simplification can be done at different levels (lexical, syntactic, semantic, stylistic...) and relies on the corresponding knowledge and resources (lexicon, rules...). Our objective is to propose methods and material for the creation of transformation rules from a small set of parallel sentences differentiated by their technicity. We also propose a typology of transformations and quantify them. We work with French-language data related to the medical domain, although we assume that the method can be exploited on texts in any language and from any domain.