Discourse-Aware Text Simplification: From Complex Sentences to Linked Propositions
Christina Niklaus, Matthias Cetto, Andr\'e Freitas, Siegfried, Handschuh

TL;DR
This paper introduces a discourse-aware text simplification method that splits complex sentences into minimal, self-contained propositions while preserving semantic context through hierarchical structures, improving downstream NLP tasks.
Contribution
It presents a novel discourse-aware approach for sentence splitting and rephrasing that maintains semantic cohesion using hierarchical structures, addressing limitations of previous syntactic methods.
Findings
Transforms complex sentences into simpler, self-contained propositions.
Maintains semantic context with hierarchical structures.
Enhances downstream NLP application performance.
Abstract
Sentences that present a complex syntax act as a major stumbling block for downstream Natural Language Processing applications whose predictive quality deteriorates with sentence length and complexity. The task of Text Simplification (TS) may remedy this situation. It aims to modify sentences in order to make them easier to process, using a set of rewriting operations, such as reordering, deletion, or splitting. State-of-the-art syntactic TS approaches suffer from two major drawbacks: first, they follow a very conservative approach in that they tend to retain the input rather than transforming it, and second, they ignore the cohesive nature of texts, where context spread across clauses or sentences is needed to infer the true meaning of a statement. To address these problems, we present a discourse-aware TS approach that splits and rephrases complex English sentences within the semantic…
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Taxonomy
TopicsText Readability and Simplification · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Topic Modeling
MethodsSpatio-temporal stability analysis
