Title
Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing
Date Issued
01 January 2021
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
University of Sheffield,
Publisher(s)
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Abstract
Text Simplification improves the readability of sentences through several rewriting transformations, such as lexical paraphrasing, deletion, and splitting. Current simplification systems are predominantly sequence-to-sequence models that are trained end-to-end to perform all these operations simultaneously. However, such systems limit themselves to mostly deleting words and cannot easily adapt to the requirements of different target audiences. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid approach that leverages linguistically-motivated rules for splitting and deletion, and couples them with a neural paraphrasing model to produce varied rewriting styles. We introduce a new data augmentation method to improve the paraphrasing capability of our model. Through automatic and manual evaluations, we show that our proposed model establishes a new state-of-the art for the task, paraphrasing more often than the existing systems, and can control the degree of each simplification operation applied to the input texts.
Start page
3536
End page
3553
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias de la computación Lingüística
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85108502641
Resource of which it is part
NAACL-HLT 2021 - 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Conference
ISBN of the container
978-195408546-6
Conference
2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2021
Sponsor(s)
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. We thank Newsela for sharing the data and NVIDIA for providing GPU computing resources. This research is supported in part by the NSF award IIS-1822754, ODNI and IARPA via the BETTER program contract 19051600004. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of NSF, ODNI, IARPA, or the U.S. Government. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation therein. National Science Foundation IIS-1822754 NSF Office of the Director of National Intelligence ODNI Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity 19051600004 IARPA
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus