Preserving Discourse Structure when Simplifying Text

Advaith Siddharthan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingPublished conference contribution

Abstract

Text simplification involves restructuring sentences by replacing particular syntactic constructs (like embedded clauses and appositives). The aim is to make the text easier to read for some target group (like aphasics and people with low reading ages) or easier to process by some program (like a parser or machine translation system). However, sentencelevel syntactic restructuring can wreak havoc with the discourse structure of a text, actually making it harder to comprehend, and possibly even altering its meaning. In this paper, we present and evaluate techniques for detecting and correcting disruptions in discourse structure caused by syntactic restructuring. In particular, we look at the issues of preserving the rhetorical relationships between the original clauses and phrases and preserving the anaphoric link structure of the text.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the European Natural Language Generation Workshop (ENLG), 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03)
Place of PublicationBudapest, Hungary
Publication statusPublished - 2003
Event11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03) - Budapest, Hungary
Duration: 12 Apr 200317 Apr 2003

Conference

Conference11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03)
Country/TerritoryHungary
CityBudapest
Period12/04/0317/04/03

Bibliographical note

Proceedings of the European Natural Language Generation Workshop (ENLG), 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL'03), April 12-17, 2003, Budapest, Hungary

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