An eye-tracking study on synonym replacement

Abstract: As the amount of information increase, the need for automatic textsimplication also increase. There are some strategies for doing thatand this thesis has studied two basic synonym replacement strategies.The rst one is called word length and is about always choosinga shorter synonym if it is possible. The second one is called wordfrequency and is about always choosing a more frequent synonym if itis possible. Three dierent versions of them were tried. The rst onewas about just choosing the shortest or most frequent synonym. Thesecond was about only choosing a synonym if it was extremely shorteror more frequent. The last was about only choosing a synonym if itmet the requirements for being replaced and was on synonym level 5.Statistical analysis of the data revealed no signicant dierence. Butsmall trends showed that always choosing a more frequent synonymthat is of level 5 seemed to make the text a bit easier.