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 paper, we formalise 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. We describe how various generation issues like sentence ordering,
cue-word selection, referring-expression generation, determiner choice and pronominal use can be resolved so as to preserve
conjunctive and anaphoric cohesive relations during syntactic simplification and present the results of an evaluation of our
syntactic simplification system.
Keywords anaphoric structure - cue-word selection - determiner choice - discourse structure - sentence ordering - syntactic simplification - text cohesion
The research reported in this paper was carried out at the University of Cambridge, U.K.