The availability of parallel sentence simplification (SS) is scarce for neural SS modelings. We propose an unsupervised method to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpora, alleviating the need for SS supervised corpora. Our met
hod is motivated by the following two findings: neural machine translation model usually tends to generate more high-frequency tokens and the difference of text complexity levels exists between the source and target language of a translation corpus. By taking the pair of the source sentences of translation corpus and the translations of their references in a bridge language, we can construct large-scale pseudo parallel SS data. Then, we keep these sentence pairs with a higher complexity difference as SS sentence pairs. The building SS corpora with an unsupervised approach can satisfy the expectations that the aligned sentences preserve the same meanings and have difference in text complexity levels. Experimental results show that SS methods trained by our corpora achieve the state-of-the-art results and significantly outperform the results on English benchmark WikiLarge.
Recently, a large pre-trained language model called T5 (A Unified Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks. However, no study has been found using this pre-trained model on Text Simplification. Th
erefore in this paper, we explore the use of T5 fine-tuning on Text Simplification combining with a controllable mechanism to regulate the system outputs that can help generate adapted text for different target audiences. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results with gains of between +0.69 and +1.41 over the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS). We argue that using a pre-trained model such as T5, trained on several tasks with large amounts of data, can help improve Text Simplification.
This paper describes SimpleNER, a model developed for the sentence simplification task at GEM-2021. Our system is a monolingual Seq2Seq Transformer architecture that uses control tokens pre-pended to the data, allowing the model to shape the generate
d simplifications according to user desired attributes. Additionally, we show that NER-tagging the training data before use helps stabilize the effect of the control tokens and significantly improves the overall performance of the system. We also employ pretrained embeddings to reduce data sparsity and allow the model to produce more generalizable outputs.
