Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing

Mounica Maddela, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Wei Xu


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.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.277
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3536–3553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.277
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.277
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mounica Maddela, Fernando Alva-Manchego, and Wei Xu. 2021. Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 3536–3553, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Text Simplification with Explicit Paraphrasing (Maddela et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.277.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.277.mp4
Data
Newsela