Unsupervised Neural Text Simplification

The paper presents a first attempt towards unsupervised neural text simplification that relies only on unlabeled text corpora. The core framework is composed of a shared encoder and a pair of attentional-decoders and gains knowledge of simplification through discrimination based-losses and denoising. The framework is trained using unlabeled text collected from en-Wikipedia dump. Our analysis (both quantitative and qualitative involving human evaluators) on a public test data shows that the proposed model can perform text-simplification at both lexical and syntactic levels, competitive to existing supervised methods. Addition of a few labelled pairs also improves the performance further.

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Results from the Paper


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Text Simplification ASSET UNTS (Unsupervised) SARI (EASSE>=0.2.1) 35.19 # 9
BLEU 76.14* # 3
Text Simplification TurkCorpus UNMT (Unsupervised) SARI (EASSE>=0.2.1) 37.20 # 15
BLEU 74.02 # 11
Text Simplification TurkCorpus UNTS-10k (Weakly supervised) SARI (EASSE>=0.2.1) 37.15 # 16
Text Simplification TurkCorpus UNTS (Unsupervised) SARI (EASSE>=0.2.1) 36.29 # 20

Methods


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