MUSST: A Multilingual Syntactic Simplification Tool

We describe MUSST, a multilingual syntactic simplification tool. The tool supports sentence simplifications for English, Italian and Spanish, and can be easily extended to other languages. Our implementation includes a set of general-purpose simplification rules, as well as a sentence selection module (to select sentences to be simplified) and a confidence model (to select only promising simplifications). The tool was implemented in the context of the European project SIMPATICO on text simplification for Public Administration (PA) texts. Our evaluation on sentences in the PA domain shows that we obtain correct simplifications for  76% of the simplified cases in English, 71% of the cases in Spanish. For Italian, the results are lower (38%) but the tool is still under development.