Sentence simplification is the task of rewriting texts so they are easier to understand. Recent research has applied sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models to this task, focusing largely on training-time improvements via reinforcement learning and memory augmentation. One of the main problems with applying generic Seq2Seq models for simplification is that these models tend to copy directly from the original sentence, resulting in outputs that are relatively long and complex. We aim to alleviate this issue through the use of two main techniques. First, we incorporate content word complexities, as predicted with a leveled word complexity model, into our loss function during training. Second, we generate a large set of diverse candidate simplifications at test time, and rerank these to promote fluency, adequacy, and simplicity. Here, we measure simplicity through a novel sentence complexity model. These extensions allow our models to perform competitively with state-of-the-art systems while generating simpler sentences. We report standard automatic and human evaluation metrics.
There are two main Seq2Seq models we will compare to in this work, along with the statistical model from . proposed DRESS (Deep REinforcement Sentence Simplification), a Seq2Seq model that uses a reinforcement learning framework at training time to reward the model for producing sentences that score high on fluency, adequacy, and simplicity. This work showed state-of-the-art results on human evaluation. However, the sentences generated by this model are in general longer than the reference simplifications. proposed DMASS (Deep Memory Augmented Sentence Simplification), a multi-layer, multi-head attention transformer architecture which also integrates simplification rules. This work has been shown to get state-of-the-art results in an automatic evaluation, training on the WikiLarge dataset introduced by . , however, does not perform a human evaluation, and restricting evaluation to automatic metrics is generally insufficient for comparing simplification models. Our model, in comparison, is able to generate shorter and simpler sentences according to Flesch-Kincaid grade level @cite_29 and human judgments, and provide a comprehensive analysis using human evaluation and a qualitative error analysis.
@cite_29
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Inspired by how humans summarize long documents, we propose an accurate and fast summarization model that first selects salient sentences and then rewrites them abstractively (i.e., compresses and paraphrases) to generate a concise overall summary. We use a novel sentence-level policy gradient method to bridge the non-differentiable computation between these two neural networks in a hierarchical way, while maintaining language fluency. Empirically, we achieve the new state-of-the-art on all metrics (including human evaluation) on the CNN Daily Mail dataset, as well as significantly higher abstractiveness scores. Moreover, by first operating at the sentence-level and then the word-level, we enable parallel decoding of our neural generative model that results in substantially faster (10-20x) inference speed as well as 4x faster training convergence than previous long-paragraph encoder-decoder models. We also demonstrate the generalization of our model on the test-only DUC-2002 dataset, where we achieve higher scores than a state-of-the-art model.