Is Simple Wikipedia simple? : – A study of readability and guidelines

Creating easy-to-read text is an issue that has traditionally been solved with manual work. But with advancing research in natural language processing, automatic systems for text simplification are being developed. These systems often need training data that is parallel aligned. For several years, simple Wikipedia has been the main source for this data. In the current study, several readability measures has been tested on a popular simplification corpus. A selection of guidelines from simple Wikipedia has also been operationalized and tested. The results imply that the following of guidelines are not greater in simple Wikipedia than in standard Wikipedia. There are however differences in the readability measures. The syntactical structures of simple Wikipedia seems to be less complex than those of standard Wikipedia. A continuation of this study would be to examine other readability measures and evaluate the guidelines not covered within the current work