One Step Closer to Automatic Evaluation of Text Simplification Systems

This study explores the possibility of replacing the costly and time-consuming human evaluation of the grammaticality and meaning preservation of the output of text simplification (TS) systems with some automatic measures. The focus is on six widely used machine translation (MT) evaluation metrics and their correlation with human judgements of grammaticality and meaning preservation in text snippets. As the results show a significant correlation between them, we go further and try to classify simplified sentences into: (1) those which are acceptable; (2) those which need minimal post-editing; and (3) those which should be discarded. The preliminary results, reported in this paper, are promising.