Sai Surya


2019

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Unsupervised Neural Text Simplification
Sai Surya | Abhijit Mishra | Anirban Laha | Parag Jain | Karthik Sankaranarayanan
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The paper presents a first attempt towards unsupervised neural text simplification that relies only on unlabeled text corpora. The core framework is composed of a shared encoder and a pair of attentional-decoders, crucially assisted by discrimination-based losses and denoising. The framework is trained using unlabeled text collected from en-Wikipedia dump. Our analysis (both quantitative and qualitative involving human evaluators) on public test data shows that the proposed model can perform text-simplification at both lexical and syntactic levels, competitive to existing supervised methods. It also outperforms viable unsupervised baselines. Adding a few labeled pairs helps improve the performance further.