Text simplification is the process of splitting and rephrasing a sentence to a sequence of sentences making it easier to read and understand while preserving the content and approximating the original meaning. Text simplification has been exploited in NLP applications like machine translation, summarization, semantic role labeling, and information extraction, opening a broad avenue for its exploitation in comprehension-based question-answering downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the effect of text simplification in the task of question-answering using a comprehension context. We release Simple-SQuAD, a simplified version of the widely-used SQuAD dataset. Firstly, we outline each step in the dataset creation pipeline, including style transfer, thresholding of sentences showing correct transfer, and offset finding for each answer. Secondly, we verify the quality of the transferred sentences through various methodologies involving both automated and human evaluation. Thirdly, we benchmark the newly created corpus and perform an ablation study for examining the effect of the simplification process in the SQuAD-based question answering task. Our experiments show that simplification leads to up to 2.04% and 1.74% increase in Exact Match and F1, respectively. Finally, we conclude with an analysis of the transfer process, investigating the types of edits made by the model, and the effect of sentence length on the transfer model.

The sentiment aggregation problem accounts for analyzing the sentiment of a user towards various aspects/features of a product, and meaningfully assimilating the pragmatic significance of these features/aspects from an opinionated text. The current paper addresses the sentiment aggregation problem, by assigning weights to each aspect appearing in the user-generated content, that are proportionate to the strategic importance of the aspect in the pragmatic domain. The novelty of this paper is in computing the pragmatic significance (weight) of each aspect, using graph centrality measures (applied on domain specific ontology-graphs extracted from ConceptNet), and deeply ingraining these weights while aggregating the sentiments from opinionated text. We experiment over multiple real-life product review data. Our system consistently outperforms the state of the art - by as much as a F-score of 20.39% in one case.