DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Framework for English and German

Christina Niklaus, Matthias Cetto, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh


Abstract
We introduce DisSim, a discourse-aware sentence splitting framework for English and German whose goal is to transform syntactically complex sentences into an intermediate representation that presents a simple and more regular structure which is easier to process for downstream semantic applications. For this purpose, we turn input sentences into a two-layered semantic hierarchy in the form of core facts and accompanying contexts, while identifying the rhetorical relations that hold between them. In that way, we preserve the coherence structure of the input and, hence, its interpretability for downstream tasks.
Anthology ID:
W19-8662
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Month:
October–November
Year:
2019
Address:
Tokyo, Japan
Editors:
Kees van Deemter, Chenghua Lin, Hiroya Takamura
Venue:
INLG
SIG:
SIGGEN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
504–507
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8662
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-8662
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Christina Niklaus, Matthias Cetto, André Freitas, and Siegfried Handschuh. 2019. DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Framework for English and German. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation, pages 504–507, Tokyo, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Framework for English and German (Niklaus et al., INLG 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-8662.pdf