Text Simplification by Tagging

Kostiantyn Omelianchuk, Vipul Raheja, Oleksandr Skurzhanskyi


Abstract
Edit-based approaches have recently shown promising results on multiple monolingual sequence transduction tasks. In contrast to conventional sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models, which learn to generate text from scratch as they are trained on parallel corpora, these methods have proven to be much more effective since they are able to learn to make fast and accurate transformations while leveraging powerful pre-trained language models. Inspired by these ideas, we present TST, a simple and efficient Text Simplification system based on sequence Tagging, leveraging pre-trained Transformer-based encoders. Our system makes simplistic data augmentations and tweaks in training and inference on a pre-existing system, which makes it less reliant on large amounts of parallel training data, provides more control over the outputs and enables faster inference speeds. Our best model achieves near state-of-the-art performance on benchmark test datasets for the task. Since it is fully non-autoregressive, it achieves faster inference speeds by over 11 times than the current state-of-the-art text simplification system.
Anthology ID:
2021.bea-1.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ekaterina Kochmar, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Claudia Leacock, Nitin Madnani, Ildikó Pilán, Helen Yannakoudakis, Torsten Zesch
Venue:
BEA
SIG:
SIGEDU
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11–25
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.bea-1.2
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kostiantyn Omelianchuk, Vipul Raheja, and Oleksandr Skurzhanskyi. 2021. Text Simplification by Tagging. In Proceedings of the 16th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 11–25, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Text Simplification by Tagging (Omelianchuk et al., BEA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.bea-1.2.pdf
Code
 grammarly/gector
Data
ASSETTurkCorpusWikiLarge