Role of Dependency Distance in Text Simplification: A Human vs ChatGPT Simplification Comparison

Abstract: This study investigates human and ChatGPT text simplification and its relationship to dependency distance. A set of 220 sentences, with increasing grammatical difficulty as measured in a prior user study, were simplified by a human expert and using ChatGPT. We found that the three sentence sets all differed in mean dependency distances: the highest in the original sentence set, followed by ChatGPT simplified sentences, and the human simplified sentences showed the lowest mean dependency distance.