Target-Level Sentence Simplification as Controlled Paraphrasing

Anonymous

Abstract: Automatic text simplification aims to reduce the linguistic complexity of a text in order to make it easier to understand and more accessible. However, simplified texts are consumed by a diverse array of target audiences and what may be appropriately simplified for one group of readers may differ considerably for another.In this work we investigate a novel formulation of sentence simplification as paraphrasing with controlled decoding, which aims to alleviate the major burden of relying on large amounts of in-domain parallel training data, while at the same time allowing for modular and adaptive simplification.According to a range of automatic metrics, our approach performs competitively against baselines that prove more difficult to adapt to the needs of different target audiences or require complex-simple parallel data.

Paper Type: short