EASSE: easier automatic sentence simplification evaluation

We introduce EASSE, a Python package aiming to facilitate and standardise automatic evaluation and comparison of Sentence Simplification (SS) systems. EASSE provides a single access point to a broad range of evaluation resources: standard automatic metrics for assessing SS outputs (e.g. SARI), word-level accuracy scores for certain simplification transformations, reference-independent quality estimation features (e.g. compression ratio), and standard test data for SS evaluation (e.g. TurkCorpus). Finally, EASSE generates easy-to-visualise reports on the various metrics and features above and on how a particular SS output fares against reference simplifications. Through experiments, we show that these functionalities allow for better comparison and understanding of the performance of SS systems

A Review of Research-Based Automatic Text Simplification Tools

In the age of knowledge, the democratisation of information facilitated through the Internet may not be as pervasive if written language poses challenges to particular sectors of the population. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of research-based automatic text simplification tools. Consequently, we describe aspects such as the language, language phenomena, language levels simplified, approaches, specific target populations these tools are created for (e.g. individuals with cognitive impairment, attention deficit, elderly people, children, language learners), and accessibility and availability considerations. The review of existing studies covering automatic text simplification tools is undergone by searching two databases: Web of Science and Scopus. The eligibility criteria involve text simplification tools with a scientific background in order to ascertain how they operate. This methodology yielded 27 text simplification tools that are further analysed. Some of the main conclusions reached with this review are the lack of resources accessible to the public, the need for customisation to foster the individual’s independence by allowing the user to select what s/he finds challenging to understand while not limiting the user’s capabilities and the need for more simplification tools in languages other than English, to mention a few.This research was conducted as part of the Clear-Text project (TED2021-130707B-I00), funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR

DEPLAIN: A German Parallel Corpus with Intralingual Translations into Plain Language for Sentence and Document Simplification

Text simplification is an intralingual translation task in which documents, or sentences of a complex source text are simplified for a target audience. The success of automatic text simplification systems is highly dependent on the quality of parallel data used for training and evaluation. To advance sentence simplification and document simplification in German, this paper presents DEplain, a new dataset of parallel, professionally written and manually aligned simplifications in plain German ("plain DE" or in German: "Einfache Sprache"). DEplain consists of a news domain (approx. 500 document pairs, approx. 13k sentence pairs) and a web-domain corpus (approx. 150 aligned documents, approx. 2k aligned sentence pairs). In addition, we are building a web harvester and experimenting with automatic alignment methods to facilitate the integration of non-aligned and to be published parallel documents. Using this approach, we are dynamically increasing the web domain corpus, so it is currently extended to approx. 750 document pairs and approx. 3.5k aligned sentence pairs. We show that using DEplain to train a transformer-based seq2seq text simplification model can achieve promising results. We make available the corpus, the adapted alignment methods for German, the web harvester and the trained models here: https://github.com/rstodden/DEPlain.Comment: Accepted to ACL 202

Multilingual Simplification of Medical Texts

Automated text simplification aims to produce simple versions of complex texts. This task is especially useful in the medical domain, where the latest medical findings are typically communicated via complex and technical articles. This creates barriers for laypeople seeking access to up-to-date medical findings, consequently impeding progress on health literacy. Most existing work on medical text simplification has focused on monolingual settings, with the result that such evidence would be available only in just one language (most often, English). This work addresses this limitation via multilingual simplification, i.e., directly simplifying complex texts into simplified texts in multiple languages. We introduce MultiCochrane, the first sentence-aligned multilingual text simplification dataset for the medical domain in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Farsi. We evaluate fine-tuned and zero-shot models across these languages, with extensive human assessments and analyses. Although models can now generate viable simplified texts, we identify outstanding challenges that this dataset might be used to address

DeepEva: A deep neural network architecture for assessing sentence complexity in Italian and English languages

Automatic Text Complexity Evaluation (ATE) is a research field that aims at creating new methodologies to make autonomous the process of the text complexity evaluation, that is the study of the text-linguistic features (e.g., lexical, syntactical, morphological) to measure the grade of comprehensibility of a text. ATE can affect positively several different contexts such as Finance, Health, and Education. Moreover, it can support the research on Automatic Text Simplification (ATS), a research area that deals with the study of new methods for transforming a text by changing its lexicon and structure to meet specific reader needs. In this paper, we illustrate an ATE approach named DeepEva, a Deep Learning based system capable of classifying both Italian and English sentences on the basis of their complexity. The system exploits the Treetagger annotation tool, two Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural unit layers, and a fully connected one. The last layer outputs the probability of a sentence belonging to the easy or complex class. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the approach for both languages, compared with several baselines such as Support Vector Machine, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest

REVISITING RECOGNIZING TEXTUAL ENTAILMENT FOR EVALUATING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS

Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) began as a unified framework to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. In recent years, RTE has evolved in the NLP community into a task that researchers focus on developing models for. This thesis revisits the tradition of RTE as an evaluation framework for NLP models, especially in the era of deep learning. Chapter 2 provides an overview of different approaches to evaluating NLP sys- tems, discusses prior RTE datasets, and argues why many of them do not serve as satisfactory tests to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of NLP systems. Chapter 3 presents a new large-scale diverse collection of RTE datasets (DNC) that tests how well NLP systems capture a range of semantic phenomena that are integral to un- derstanding human language. Chapter 4 demonstrates how the DNC can be used to evaluate reasoning capabilities of NLP models. Chapter 5 discusses the limits of RTE as an evaluation framework by illuminating how existing datasets contain biases that may enable crude modeling approaches to perform surprisingly well. The remaining aspects of the thesis focus on issues raised in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 addresses issues in prior RTE datasets focused on paraphrasing and presents a high-quality test set that can be used to analyze how robust RTE systems are to paraphrases. Chapter 7 demonstrates how modeling approaches on biases, e.g. adversarial learning, can enable RTE models overcome biases discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 8 applies these methods to the task of discovering emergency needs during disaster events

Universal rewriting via machine translation

Natural language allows for the same meaning (semantics) to be expressed in multiple different ways, i.e. paraphrasing. This thesis examines automatic approaches for paraphrasing, focusing on three paraphrasing subtasks: unconstrained paraphrasing where there are no constraints on the output, simplification, where the output must be simpler than the input, and text compression where the output must be shorter than the input. Whilst we can learn paraphrasing from supervised data, this data is sparse and expensive to create. This thesis is concerned with the use of transfer learning to improve paraphrasing when there is no supervised data. In particular, we address the following question: can transfer learning be used to overcome a lack of paraphrasing data? To answer this question we split it into three subquestions (1) No supervised data exists for a specific paraphrasing task; can bilingual data be used as a source of training data for paraphrasing? (2) Supervised paraphrasing data exists in one language but not in another; can bilingual data be used to transfer paraphrasing training data from one language to another? (3) Can the output of encoder-decoder paraphrasing models be controlled