Learning to Simplify Sentences Using Wikipedia

Abstract

In this paper we examine the sentence simplification problem as an English-to-English translation problem, utilizing a corpus of 137K aligned sentence pairs extracted by aligning English Wikipedia and Simple English Wikipedia. This data set contains the full range of transformation operations including rewording, reordering, insertion and deletion. We introduce a new translation model for text simplification that extends a phrasebased machine translation approach to include phrasal deletion. Evaluated based on three metrics that compare against a human reference (BLEU, word-F1 and SSA) our new approach performs significantly better than two text compression techniques (including T3) and the phrase-based translation system without deletion. 1