To build automated simplification systems, corpora of complex sentences and their simplified versions is the first step to understand sentence complexity and enable the development of automatic text simplification systems. We present a lexical and syntactically simplified Urdu simplification corpus with a detailed analysis of the various simplification operations and human evaluation of corpus quality. We further analyze our corpora using text readability measures and present a comparison of the original, lexical simplified and syntactically simplified corpora. In addition, we compare our corpus with other existing simplification corpora by building simplification systems and evaluating these systems using BLEU and SARI scores. Our system achieves the highest BLEU score and comparable SARI score in comparison to other systems. We release our simplification corpora for the benefit of the research community.

Complex sentences are a hurdle in the learning process of language learners. Sentence simplification aims to convert a complex sentence into its simpler form such that it is easily comprehensible. To build such automated simplification systems, corpora of complex sentences and their simplified versions is the first step to understand sentence complexity and enable the development of automatic text simplification systems. No such corpus has yet been developed for Urdu and we fill this gap by developing one such corpus to help start readability and automatic sentence simplification research. We present a lexical and syntactically simplified Urdu simplification corpus and a detailed analysis of the various simplification operations. We further analyze our corpora using text readability measures and present a comparison of the original, lexical simplified, and syntactically simplified corpora.