An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages

Xinyu Lu, Jipeng Qiang, Yun Li, Yunhao Yuan, Yi Zhu


Abstract
The availability of parallel sentence simplification (SS) is scarce for neural SS modelings. We propose an unsupervised method to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpora, alleviating the need for SS supervised corpora. Our method is motivated by the following two findings: neural machine translation model usually tends to generate more high-frequency tokens and the difference of text complexity levels exists between the source and target language of a translation corpus. By taking the pair of the source sentences of translation corpus and the translations of their references in a bridge language, we can construct large-scale pseudo parallel SS data. Then, we keep these sentence pairs with a higher complexity difference as SS sentence pairs. The building SS corpora with an unsupervised approach can satisfy the expectations that the aligned sentences preserve the same meanings and have difference in text complexity levels. Experimental results show that SS methods trained by our corpora achieve the state-of-the-art results and significantly outperform the results on English benchmark WikiLarge.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.22
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
227–237
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.22
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.22
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinyu Lu, Jipeng Qiang, Yun Li, Yunhao Yuan, and Yi Zhu. 2021. An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 227–237, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages (Lu et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.22.pdf
Software:
 2021.findings-emnlp.22.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.22.mp4
Code
 luxinyu1/trans-ss
Data
ASSETWikiLarge