ASSET: A Dataset for Tuning and Evaluation of Sentence Simplification Models with Multiple Rewriting Transformations

Fernando Alva-Manchego, Louis Martin, Antoine Bordes, Carolina Scarton, Benoît Sagot, Lucia Specia


Abstract
In order to simplify a sentence, human editors perform multiple rewriting transformations: they split it into several shorter sentences, paraphrase words (i.e. replacing complex words or phrases by simpler synonyms), reorder components, and/or delete information deemed unnecessary. Despite these varied range of possible text alterations, current models for automatic sentence simplification are evaluated using datasets that are focused on a single transformation, such as lexical paraphrasing or splitting. This makes it impossible to understand the ability of simplification models in more realistic settings. To alleviate this limitation, this paper introduces ASSET, a new dataset for assessing sentence simplification in English. ASSET is a crowdsourced multi-reference corpus where each simplification was produced by executing several rewriting transformations. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that simplifications in ASSET are better at capturing characteristics of simplicity when compared to other standard evaluation datasets for the task. Furthermore, we motivate the need for developing better methods for automatic evaluation using ASSET, since we show that current popular metrics may not be suitable when multiple simplification transformations are performed.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.424
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4668–4679
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.424
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.424
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fernando Alva-Manchego, Louis Martin, Antoine Bordes, Carolina Scarton, Benoît Sagot, and Lucia Specia. 2020. ASSET: A Dataset for Tuning and Evaluation of Sentence Simplification Models with Multiple Rewriting Transformations. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4668–4679, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ASSET: A Dataset for Tuning and Evaluation of Sentence Simplification Models with Multiple Rewriting Transformations (Alva-Manchego et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.424.pdf
Dataset:
 2020.acl-main.424.Dataset.zip
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929012
Code
 facebookresearch/asset
Data
ASSETASSET CorpusNewselaTurkCorpusWikiLarge