Machine Translation systems have been adapted to translate complex sentences into simple ones <cite>(Zhu et al., 2010</cite>; Wubben et al., 2012; Coster and Kauchak, 2011) . And handcrafted rules have been proposed to model the syntactic transformations involved in simplifications (Siddharthan et al., 2004; Siddharthan, 2011; Chandrasekar et al., 1996) . In this paper, we present a hybrid approach to sentence simplification which departs from this previous work in two main ways.