All citizens of the European Union have a democratic right to participate in the social and economic life of the society in which they live. Access to information about their society’s culture, literature, laws, local and national policies and ethos is fundamental in order to take part in mainstream life.   Thanks to the availability of texts on the Web in recent years, increased knowledge and information have been made available to broader audiences. However, the way in which a text is written—its vocabulary, its syntax—can be difficult to read and understand for many people, especially those with poor literacy, cognitive or linguistic impairment, or those with limited knowledge of the language of the text. Automatic text simplification (Saggion, 2017) is the process of transforming a text into another text which, ideally conveying the same message, will be easier to read and understand by a broader audience. 

ConMuTeS  is a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation  to advance the state of the art in the field of automatic text simplification by providing a novel method of simplification which takes into account the context in which the information to be simplified occurs. Our project will address the following objectives:

• Carry out research related to the topic of context-aware text simplification.
• Develop new methods for the simplification of texts in Spanish and English based on an empirical approach.
• Assess the effect of context and readability information as essential components to inform text simplification.
• Evaluate the developed methods against current state of the art system by relying on available benchmarking datasets.
• Evaluate the result of the simplification system by relying on human informants.