MUSS: Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification by Mining Paraphrases

Louis Martin, Angela Fan, Éric de la Clergerie, Antoine Bordes, Benoît Sagot


Abstract
Progress in sentence simplification has been hindered by a lack of labeled parallel simplification data, particularly in languages other than English. We introduce MUSS, a Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification system that does not require labeled simplification data. MUSS uses a novel approach to sentence simplification that trains strong models using sentence-level paraphrase data instead of proper simplification data. These models leverage unsupervised pretraining and controllable generation mechanisms to flexibly adjust attributes such as length and lexical complexity at inference time. We further present a method to mine such paraphrase data in any language from Common Crawl using semantic sentence embeddings, thus removing the need for labeled data. We evaluate our approach on English, French, and Spanish simplification benchmarks and closely match or outperform the previous best supervised results, despite not using any labeled simplification data. We push the state of the art further by incorporating labeled simplification data.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.176
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1651–1664
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.176
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Louis Martin, Angela Fan, Éric de la Clergerie, Antoine Bordes, and Benoît Sagot. 2022. MUSS: Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification by Mining Paraphrases. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1651–1664, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
MUSS: Multilingual Unsupervised Sentence Simplification by Mining Paraphrases (Martin et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.176.pdf
Code
 facebookresearch/muss
Data
ASSETNewselaTurkCorpusWikiLarge