  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.
