Lexical Simplification is the task of reducing the lexical complexity of textual documents by replacing difficult words with easier to read (or understand) expressions while preserving the original meaning. The development of robust pipelined multilingual architectures able to adapt to new languages is of paramount importance in lexical simplification. This paper describes and evaluates a modular hybrid linguistic-statistical Lexical Simplifier that deals with the four major Ibero-Romance Languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician. The architecture of the system is the same for the four languages addressed, only the language resources used during simplification are language specific.

In this article we present an exploratory approach to enrich a WordNet-like lexical ontology with the synonyms present in a standard monolingual Portuguese dictionary. The dictionary was converted from PDF into XML and senses were automatically identified and annotated. This allowed us to extract them, independently of definitions, and to create sets of synonyms (synsets). These synsets were then aligned with WordNet synsets, both in the same language (Portuguese) and projecting the Portuguese terms into English, Spanish and Galician. This process allowed both the addition of new term variants to existing synsets, as to create new synsets for Portuguese.

In this paper, we present the methodology developed by the SLI (Computational Linguistics Group of the University of Vigo) for the building and processing of the CLUVI Corpus, showing the TMX-based XML specification designed to encode both morphosyntactic features and translation alignments in parallel corpora, and the solutions adopted for making the CLUVI parallel corpora freely available over the WWW (http://sli.uvigo.es/CLUVI/).