Splitting Complex English Sentences

John Lee, J. Buddhika K. Pathirage Don


Abstract
This paper applies parsing technology to the task of syntactic simplification of English sentences, focusing on the identification of text spans that can be removed from a complex sentence. We report the most comprehensive evaluation to-date on this task, using a dataset of sentences that exhibit simplification based on coordination, subordination, punctuation/parataxis, adjectival clauses, participial phrases, and appositive phrases. We train a decision tree with features derived from text span length, POS tags and dependency relations, and show that it significantly outperforms a parser-only baseline.
Anthology ID:
W17-6307
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Pisa, Italy
Editors:
Yusuke Miyao, Kenji Sagae
Venue:
IWPT
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
50–55
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-6307
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
John Lee and J. Buddhika K. Pathirage Don. 2017. Splitting Complex English Sentences. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Parsing Technologies, pages 50–55, Pisa, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Splitting Complex English Sentences (Lee & Don, IWPT 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-6307.pdf