The Fewer, the Better? A Contrastive Study about Ways to Simplify

Simplified texts play an important role in providing accessible and easy-to-understand information for a whole range of users who, due to linguistic, developmental or social barriers, would have difficulty in understanding materials which are not adapted and/or simplified. However, the production of simplified texts can be a time-consuming and labour-intensive task. In this paper we show that the employment of a short list of simple simplification rules could result in texts of comparable readability to those written as a result of applying a long list of more fine-grained rules. We also prove that the simplification process based on the short list of simple rules is more time efficient and consistent. 1 Rationale Simplified texts play an important role in providing accessible and easy-to-understand information for a whole range of users who, due to linguistic, developmental or social barriers, would have difficulty in understanding materials which are not adapted and/or simplified. Such users include but are not limited to people with insufficient knowledge of the language in which the document is written, people with specific language disorders and people with low literacy levels. However, while the production of simplified texts is certainly an indispensable activity, it often proves to be a time-consuming and labour-intensive task. Various methodologies and simplification strategies have been developed which are often employed by authors to simplify original texts. Most methods involve a high number of rules which could result not only in the simplification task being time-consuming but also in the authors getting confused as to which rules to apply. We hypothesise that it is possible to achieve a comparable simplification effect by using a small set of simple rules similar to the ones used in Controlled Languages which, in addition, enhances the productivity and reliability of the simplification process. In order to test our hypothesis we conduct the following experiments. First, we propose six Controlled Language-inspired rules which we believe are simple and easy enough for writers of simplified texts to understand and apply. We then ask two writers to apply these rules to a selection of newswire texts and also to produce simplified versions of these texts using the 28 rules used in the Simplext project (Saggion et al., 2011). Both sets of texts are compared in terms of readability. In both simplification tasks the time efficiency is assessed and the inter-annotator agreement is evaluated. In an additional experiment, we seek to investigate the possible effect of familiarisation in simplification. In this experiment a third writer simplifies a sample of the texts used in the previous experiments by applying each set of rules in a mixed sequence pattern which does not offer any familiarisation nor the advantage of one set of rules over the other. Using these samples, three-way inter-annotator agreement is reported. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 outlines related work on simplification rules. Section 3 introduces our proposal for a small set of easy-to-understand and easy-to-apply rules and contrasts them with the longer and more elaborate rules employed in the Simplext proposal. Section 4 details the experiments conducted in order to validate or refute our hypothesis, and outlines the data used for the experiments. Section 5 presents and discusses the results, while the last section of the paper summarises the main conclusions of this study.