Iterative Edit-Based Unsupervised Sentence Simplification

Abstract: We present a novel iterative, edit-based approach to unsupervised sentence simplification. Our model is guided by a scoring function involving fluency, simplicity, and meaning preservation. Then, we iteratively perform word and phrase-level edits on the complex sentence. Compared with previous approaches, our model does not require a parallel training set, but is more controllable and interpretable. Experiments on Newsela and WikiLarge datasets show that our approach is nearly as effective as state-of-the-art supervised approaches.