Optimizing Statistical Machine Translation for Text Simplification

Most recent sentence simplification systems use basic machine translation models to learn lexical and syntactic paraphrases from a manually simplified parallel corpus. These methods are limited by the quality and quantity of manually simplified corpora, which are expensive to build. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth adaptation of statistical machine translation to perform text simplification, taking advantage of large-scale paraphrases learned from bilingual texts and a small amount of manual simplifications with multiple references. Our work is the first to design automatic metrics that are effective for tuning and evaluating simplification systems, which will facilitate iterative development for this task.

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Datasets


Introduced in the Paper:

TurkCorpus

Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Benchmark
Text Simplification TurkCorpus SBMT-SARI SARI (EASSE>=0.2.1) 39.56 # 8
BLEU 73.08* # 14

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