The successfully completed FIRST project has developed various components which help users to analyse the complexity of texts and rewrite texts in order to make them more accessible for readers with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These components were integrated in the OpenBook tool, but they cannot be used in isolation. In an attempt to make some of this technology available for other researchers, we started a process of releasing some of the components individually. The first component to be released as a web demo is the syntactic
complexity sign tagger. This is a tool that assigns words and punctuation marks from a predefined set to categories indicating their syntactic linking and bounding functions. Some of these categories are used by our sentence rewriting algorithm.

You can try the demo at http://rgcl.wlv.ac.uk/demos/SignTaggerWebDemo/ and read more about the research behind the demo in:

Evans, R., & Orasan, C. (2013). Annotating signs of syntactic complexity to support sentence simplification. In I. Habernal & V. Matousek (Eds.), Text, Speech and Dialogue. Proceedings of the 16th International Conference TSD 2013. Plzen, Czech Republic: Springer. pp. 92 – 104

Dornescu, I., Evans, R., & Orasan, C. (2013). A Tagging Approach to Identify Complex Constituents for Text Simplification. In Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2013). Hissar, Bulgaria, pp. 221 – 229

The source of the web demo is available on GitHub. You can also use the Sign Tagger as a standalone application. The code for that is also available in GitHub, but more tidying up is needed. We hope to embed some of the technology in our new tool AUTOR.