Sentence Simplification with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Xingxing Zhang, Mirella Lapata

Abstract: Sentence simplification aims to make sentences easier to read and understand. Most recent approaches draw on insights from machine translation to learn simplification rewrites from monolingual corpora of complex and simple sentences. We address the simplification problem with an encoder-decoder model coupled with a deep reinforcement learning framework. Our model explores the space of possible simplifications while learning to optimize a reward function that encourages outputs which are simple, fluent, and preserve the meaning of the input. Experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our model brings significant improvements over the state of the art.