While the automatic analysis of the read- ability of texts has a long history, the use of readability assessment for text simplifi- cation has received only little attention so far. In this paper, we explore readability models for identifying differences in the reading levels of simplified and unsimpli- fied versions of sentences. Our experiments show that a relative rank- ing is preferable to an absolute binary one and that the accuracy of identifying rel- ative simplification depends on the ini- tial reading level of the unsimplified ver- sion. The approach is particularly success- ful in classifying the relative reading level of harder sentences. In terms of practical relevance, the ap- proach promises to be useful for identi- fying particularly relevant targets for sim- plification and...

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