Place: CS Conference Room in MUDD
Abstract:
Syntactic simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical complexity of a text, while retaining its information content and meaning. The aim of syntactic simplification is to make text easier to comprehend for human readers, or process by programs. In this talk, I describe how syntactic simplification can be achieved using shallow robust analysis, a small set of hand-crafted simplification rules and a detailed analysis of the discourse-level aspects of syntactically rewriting text.
As part of the initial analysis, I present novel techniques for relative clause and appositive attachment. I argue that these attachment decisions are not purely syntactic. My approaches rely on a shallow discourse model and on animacy information obtained from a lexical knowledge base.
But my focus for this talk is on formalizing the interactions that take place between syntax and discourse during the simplification process. This is important because the usefulness of syntactic simplification in making a text accessible to a wider audience can be undermined if the rewritten text lacks cohesion.
This talk is primarily an overview of my doctoral research. If time permits, I shall also overview some of my work-in-progress, presenting applications of syntactic simplification in sentences clustering and in multi-document summarization.