Question: What challenges are faced by the lexical simplification approach?
Evidence: Text simplification aims to reduce the lexical and structural complexity of a text, while still retaining the semantic meaning, which can help children, non-native speakers, and people with cognitive disabilities, to understand text better. One of the methods of automatic text simplification can be generally divided into three categories: lexical simplification (LS) BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 , rule-based BIBREF2 , and machine translation (MT) BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 . LS is mainly used to simplify text by substituting infrequent and difficult words with frequent and easier words. However, there are several challenges for the LS approach: a great number of transformation rules are required for reasonable coverage and should be applied based on the specific context; third, the syntax and semantic meaning of the sentence is hard to retain. Rule-based approaches use hand-crafted rules for lexical and syntactic simplification, for example, substituting difficult words in a predefined vocabulary. However, such approaches need a lot of human-involvement to manually define these rules, and it is impossible to give all possible simplification rules. MT-based approach has attracted great attention in the last several years, which addresses text simplification as a monolingual machine translation problem translating from 'ordinary' and 'simplified' sentences.
In recent years, neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a newly-proposed deep learning approach and achieves very impressive results BIBREF5 , BIBREF6 , BIBREF7 . Unlike the traditional phrased-based machine translation system which operates on small components separately, NMT system is being trained end-to-end, without the need to have external decoders, language models or phrase tables. Therefore, the existing architectures in NMT are used for text simplification BIBREF8 , BIBREF4 . However, most recent work using NMT is limited to the training data that are scarce and expensive to build. Language models trained on simplified corpora have played a central role in statistical text simplification BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 . One main reason is the amount of available simplified corpora typically far exceeds the amount of parallel data. The performance of models can be typically improved when trained on more data. Therefore, we expect simplified corpora to be especially helpful for NMT models.
In contrast to previous work, which uses the existing NMT models, we explore strategy to include simplified training corpora in the training process without changing the neural network architecture. We first propose to pair simplified training sentences with synthetic ordinary sentences during training, and treat this synthetic data as additional training data. We obtain synthetic ordinary sentences through back-translation, i.e. an automatic translation of the simplified sentence into the ordinary sentence BIBREF11 . Then, we mix the synthetic data into the original (simplified-ordinary) data to train NMT model. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets show that we can improve the text simplification quality of NMT models by mixing simplified sentences into the training set over NMT model only using the original training data.
However, there are several challenges for the LS approach: a great number of transformation rules are required for reasonable coverage and should be applied based on the specific context; third, the syntax and semantic meaning of the sentence is hard to retain.
Answer: A great number of transformation rules are required for reasonable coverage and should be applied based on the specific context; third, the syntax and semantic meaning of the sentence is hard to retain.