Simplicity Level Estimate (SLE): A Learned Reference-Less Metric for Sentence Simplification

Liam Cripwell, Joël Legrand, Claire Gardent

Submission Type: Regular Short Paper

Submission Track: Natural Language Generation

Submission Track 2: Resources and Evaluation

Keywords: simplification, evaluation, quality estimation

Abstract: Automatic evaluation for sentence simplification remains a challenging problem. Most popular evaluation metrics require multiple high-quality references -- something not readily available for simplification -- which makes it difficult to test performance on unseen domains. Furthermore, most existing metrics conflate simplicity with correlated attributes such as fluency or meaning preservation. We propose a new learned evaluation metric --- SLE --- which focuses on simplicity, outperforming almost all existing metrics in terms of correlation with human judgements.

Submission Number: 3070