@inproceedings{alva-manchego-etal-2019-cross,
    title = "Cross-Sentence Transformations in Text Simplification",
    author = "Alva-Manchego, Fernando  and
      Scarton, Carolina  and
      Specia, Lucia",
    editor = "Axelrod, Amittai  and
      Yang, Diyi  and
      Cunha, Rossana  and
      Shaikh, Samira  and
      Waseem, Zeerak",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2019 Workshop on Widening NLP",
    month = aug,
    year = "2019",
    address = "Florence, Italy",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W19-3656/",
    pages = "181--184",
    abstract = "Current approaches to Text Simplification focus on simplifying sentences individually. However, certain simplification transformations span beyond single sentences (e.g. joining and re-ordering sentences). In this paper, we motivate the need for modelling the simplification task at the document level, and assess the performance of sequence-to-sequence neural models in this setup. We analyse parallel original-simplified documents created by professional editors and show that there are frequent rewriting transformations that are not restricted to sentence boundaries. We also propose strategies to automatically evaluate the performance of a simplification model on these cross-sentence transformations. Our experiments show the inability of standard sequence-to-sequence neural models to learn these transformations, and suggest directions towards document-level simplification."
}