[GolDDranks]

P.S. Machine translation is often considered as one of the most typical examples of NLP problems, but it would be also interesting to see "machine simplification" to get more attention. Can we automate the translation from English to Simple English? Currently not very well.

[adrianN]

I don't think that's an easier problem than machine translation between "different" languages. You still need to understand the source text well enough to figure out the meaning and reproduce it using different words.

[andreasvc]

Text simplification and summarization are active fields of research. Machine translation is indeed more active, but this is understandable given its commercial applications.

[TuringTest]

I think it is more likely that computers will first manage to understand texts written in Simple English way before they are able to do the same with English.

That is not surprising, as that's exactly how humans learn to work with language.