(Psycho-)Linguistic Features Meet Transformer Models for Improved Explainable and Controllable Text Simplification

Yu Qiao, Xiaofei Li, Daniel Wiechmann, Elma Kerz


Abstract
State-of-the-art text simplification (TS) systems adopt end-to-end neural network models to directly generate the simplified version of the input text, and usually function as a blackbox. Moreover, TS is usually treated as an all-purpose generic task under the assumption of homogeneity, where the same simplification is suitable for all. In recent years, however, there has been increasing recognition of the need to adapt the simplification techniques to the specific needs of different target groups. In this work, we aim to advance current research on explainable and controllable TS in two ways: First, building on recently proposed work to increase the transparency of TS systems (Garbacea et al., 2020), we use a large set of (psycho-)linguistic features in combination with pre-trained language models to improve explainable complexity prediction. Second, based on the results of this preliminary task, we extend a state-of-the-art Seq2Seq TS model, ACCESS (Martin et al., 2020), to enable explicit control of ten attributes. The results of experiments show (1) that our approach improves the performance of state-of-the-art models for predicting explainable complexity and (2) that explicitly conditioning the Seq2Seq model on ten attributes leads to a significant improvement in performance in both within-domain and out-of-domain settings.
Anthology ID:
2022.tsar-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual)
Editors:
Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggion, Daniel Ferrés, Matthew Shardlow, Kim Cheng Sheang, Kai North, Marcos Zampieri, Wei Xu
Venue:
TSAR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
125–146
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu Qiao, Xiaofei Li, Daniel Wiechmann, and Elma Kerz. 2022. (Psycho-)Linguistic Features Meet Transformer Models for Improved Explainable and Controllable Text Simplification. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), pages 125–146, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
(Psycho-)Linguistic Features Meet Transformer Models for Improved Explainable and Controllable Text Simplification (Qiao et al., TSAR 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.12.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.12.mp4