Leveraging event-based semantics for automated text simplification

Abstract

Automated Text Simplification (ATS) aims to transform complex texts into their simpler variants which are easier to understand to wider audiences and easier to process with natural language processing (NLP) tools. While simplification can be applied on lexical, syntactic, and discourse level, all previously proposed ATS systems only operated on the first two levels, thus failing at simplifying texts on the discourse level. We present a semantically-motivated ATS system which is the first system that is applied on the discourse level. By exploiting the state-of-the-art event extraction system, it is the first ATS system able to eliminate large portions of irrelevant information from texts, by maintaining only those parts of the original text that belong to factual event mentions. A few handcrafted rules ensure that the output of the system is syntactically simple, by placing each factual event mention in a separate short sentence, while the state-of-the-art unsupervised lexical simplification module, based on using word embeddings, replaces complex and infrequent words with their simpler variants. We perform a thorough evaluation, both automatic and manual, showing that our system produces more readable and simpler texts than the state-of-the-art ATS systems. Our newly proposed post-editing evaluation further reveals that our system requires less human effort for correcting grammaticality and meaning preservation on news articles than the state-of-the-art ATS system.