DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Frameworkfor English and German

TL;DR

DisSim is a discourse-aware framework for simplifying complex English and German sentences by transforming them into a hierarchical structure that preserves coherence for better downstream processing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel discourse-aware sentence splitting method that creates a hierarchical semantic representation while maintaining coherence in two languages.

Findings

Effective in simplifying sentences while preserving meaning

Applicable to both English and German

Enhances downstream semantic task performance

Abstract

We introduce DisSim, a discourse-aware sentence splitting framework for English and German whose goal is to transform syntactically complex sentences into an intermediate representation that presents a simple and more regular structure which is easier to process for downstream semantic applications. For this purpose, we turn input sentences into a two-layered semantic hierarchy in the form of core facts and accompanying contexts, while identifying the rhetorical relations that hold between them. In that way, we preserve the coherence structure of the input and, hence, its interpretability for downstream tasks.