Design and Annotation of the First Italian Corpus for Text Simplification

In this paper, we present design and construction of the first Italian corpus for automatic and semi--automatic text simplification. In line with current approaches, we propose a new annotation scheme specifically conceived to identify the typology of changes an original sentence undergoes when it is manually simplified. Such a scheme has been applied to two aligned Italian corpora, containing original texts with corresponding simplified versions, selected as representative of two different manual simplification strategies and addressing different target reader populations. Each corpus was annotated with the operations foreseen in the annotation scheme, covering different levels of linguistic description. Annotation results were analysed with the final aim of capturing peculiarities and differences of the different simplification strategies pursued in the two corpora.