Simple, readable sub-sentences

Sigrid Klerke, Anders Søgaard

Abstract: We present experiments using a new unsupervised approach to automatic text simplification, which builds on sampling and ranking via a loss function informed by readability research. The main idea is that a loss function can distinguish good simplification candidates among randomly sampled sub-sentences of the input sentence. Our approach is rated as equally grammatical and beginner reader appropriate as a supervised SMT-based baseline system by native speakers, but our setup performs more radical changes that better resembles the variation observed in human generated simplifications.