Context-Aware Document Simplification

Liam Cripwell, Joël Legrand, Claire Gardent

Abstract
To date, most work on text simplification has focused on sentence-level inputs. Early attempts at document simplification merely applied these approaches iteratively over the sentences of a document. However, this fails to coherently preserve the discourse structure, leading to suboptimal output quality. Recently, strategies from controllable simplification have been leveraged to achieve state-of-the-art results on document simplification by first generating a document-level plan (a sequence of sentence-level simplification operations) and using this plan to guide sentence-level simplification downstream. However, this is still limited in that the simplification model has no direct access to the local inter-sentence document context, likely having a negative impact on surface realisation. We explore various systems that use document context within the simplification process itself, either by iterating over larger text units or by extending the system architecture to attend over a high-level representation of document context. In doing so, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the document simplification task, even when not relying on plan-guidance. Further, we investigate the performance and efficiency tradeoffs of system variants and make suggestions of when each should be preferred.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.834
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13190–13206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.834
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.834
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liam Cripwell, Joël Legrand, and Claire Gardent. 2023. Context-Aware Document Simplification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 13190–13206, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Context-Aware Document Simplification (Cripwell et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-acl.834.pdf
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