Building a Monolingual Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification Using Sentence Similarity Based on Alignment between Word Embeddings

Tomoyuki Kajiwara, Mamoru Komachi


Abstract
Methods for text simplification using the framework of statistical machine translation have been extensively studied in recent years. However, building the monolingual parallel corpus necessary for training the model requires costly human annotation. Monolingual parallel corpora for text simplification have therefore been built only for a limited number of languages, such as English and Portuguese. To obviate the need for human annotation, we propose an unsupervised method that automatically builds the monolingual parallel corpus for text simplification using sentence similarity based on word embeddings. For any sentence pair comprising a complex sentence and its simple counterpart, we employ a many-to-one method of aligning each word in the complex sentence with the most similar word in the simple sentence and compute sentence similarity by averaging these word similarities. The experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed method in a monolingual parallel corpus construction task for English text simplification. The results also demonstrated the superior accuracy in text simplification that use the framework of statistical machine translation trained using the corpus built by the proposed method to that using the existing corpora.
Anthology ID:
C16-1109
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
1147–1158
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1109
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tomoyuki Kajiwara and Mamoru Komachi. 2016. Building a Monolingual Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification Using Sentence Similarity Based on Alignment between Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 1147–1158, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Building a Monolingual Parallel Corpus for Text Simplification Using Sentence Similarity Based on Alignment between Word Embeddings (Kajiwara & Komachi, COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1109.pdf