Representation transfer and data cleaning in multi-views for text simplification

Abstract

Representation transfer is a widely used technique in natural language processing. We propose methods of cleaning the dominant dataset of text simplification (TS) WikiLarge in multi-views to remove errors that impact model training and fine-tuning. The results show that our method can effectively refine the dataset. We propose to take the pre-trained text representations from a similar task (e.g., text summarization) to text simplification to conduct a continue-fine-tuning strategy to improve the performance of pre-trained models on TS. This approach will speed up the training and make the model convergence easier. Besides, we also propose a new decoding strategy for simple text generation. It is able to generate simpler and more comprehensible text with controllable lexical simplicity. The experimental results show that our method can achieve good performance on many evaluation metrics.