Paraphrasing re-expresses meaning to enhance applications like text simplification, machine translation, and question-answering. Specific paraphrase types facilitate accurate semantic analysis and robust language models. However, existing paraphrase-type generation methods often misalign with human preferences due to reliance on automated metrics and limited human-annotated training data, obscuring crucial aspects of semantic fidelity and linguistic transformations. This study addresses this gap by leveraging a human-ranked paraphrase-type dataset and integrating Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align model outputs directly with human judgments. DPO-based training increases paraphrase-type generation accuracy by 3 percentage points over a supervised baseline and raises human preference ratings by 7 percentage points. A newly created human-annotated dataset supports more rigorous future evaluations. Additionally, a paraphrase-type detection model achieves F1 scores of 0.91 for addition/deletion, 0.78 for same polarity substitution, and 0.70 for punctuation changes. These findings demonstrate that preference data and DPO training produce more reliable, semantically accurate paraphrases, enabling downstream applications such as improved summarization and more robust question-answering. The PTD model surpasses automated metrics and provides a more reliable framework for evaluating paraphrase quality, advancing paraphrase-type research toward richer, user-aligned language generation and establishing a stronger foundation for future evaluations grounded in human-centric criteria.
Document-level text generation tasks are known to be more difficult than sentence-level text generation tasks as they require the understanding of longer context to generate high-quality texts. In this paper, we investigate the adaption of Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding for document-level text generation tasks. MBR decoding makes use of a utility function to estimate the output with the highest expected utility from a set of candidate outputs. Although MBR decoding is shown to be effective in a wide range of sentence-level text generation tasks, its performance on document-level text generation tasks is limited as many of the utility functions are designed for evaluating the utility of sentences. To this end, we propose MBR-OT, a variant of MBR decoding using Wasserstein distance to compute the utility of a document using a sentence-level utility function. The experimental result shows that the performance of MBR-OT outperforms that of the standard MBR in document-level machine translation, text simplification, and dense image captioning tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinnaiyuu/mbr-optimal-transport
The general public often encounters complex texts but does not have the time or expertise to fully understand them, leading to the spread of misinformation. Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) helps make information more accessible, but its evaluation methods have not kept up with advances in text generation, especially with Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, recent studies have shown that current ATS metrics do not correlate with the presence of errors. Manual inspections have further revealed a variety of errors, underscoring the need for a more nuanced evaluation framework, which is currently lacking. This resource paper addresses this gap by introducing a test collection for detecting and classifying errors in simplified texts. First, we propose a taxonomy of errors, with a formal focus on information distortion. Next, we introduce a parallel dataset of automatically simplified scientific texts. This dataset has been human-annotated with labels based on our proposed taxonomy. Finally, we analyze the quality of the dataset, and we study the performance of existing models to detect and classify errors from that taxonomy. These contributions give researchers the tools to better evaluate errors in ATS, develop more reliable models, and ultimately improve the quality of automatically simplified texts.
Understanding health information is essential in achieving and maintaining a healthy life. We focus on simplifying health information for better understanding. With the availability of generative AI, the simplification process has become efficient and of reasonable quality, however, the algorithms remove information that may be crucial for comprehension. In this study, we compare generative AI to detect missing information in simplified text, evaluate its importance, and fix the text with the missing information. We collected 50 health information texts and simplified them using gpt-4-0613. We compare five approaches to identify missing elements and regenerate the text by inserting the missing elements. These five approaches involve adding missing entities and missing words in various ways: 1) adding all the missing entities, 2) adding all missing words, 3) adding the top-3 entities ranked by gpt-4-0613, and 4, 5) serving as controls for comparison, adding randomly chosen entities. We use cosine similarity and ROUGE scores to evaluate the semantic similarity and content overlap between the original, simplified, and reconstructed simplified text. We do this for both summaries and full text. Overall, we find that adding missing entities improves the text. Adding all the missing entities resulted in better text regeneration, which was better than adding the top-ranked entities or words, or random words. Current tools can identify these entities, but are not valuable in ranking them.
The continued rise of neural networks and large language models in the more recent past has altered the natural language processing landscape, enabling new approaches towards typical language tasks and achieving mainstream success. Despite the huge success of large language models, many disadvantages still remain and through this work we assess the state of the art in five application scenarios with a particular focus on the future perspectives and sensible application scenarios of traditional and older approaches and techniques. In this paper we survey recent publications in the application scenarios classification, information and relation extraction, text simplification as well as text summarization. After defining our terminology, i.e., which features are characteristic for traditional techniques in our interpretation for the five scenarios, we survey if such traditional approaches are still being used, and if so, in what way they are used. It turns out that all five application scenarios still exhibit traditional models in one way or another, as part of a processing pipeline, as a comparison/baseline to the core model of the respective paper, or as the main model(s) of the paper. For the complete statistics, see https://zenodo.org/records/13683801
Information on the web, such as scientific publications and Wikipedia, often surpasses users' reading level. To help address this, we used a self-refinement approach to develop a LLM capability for minimally lossy text simplification. To validate our approach, we conducted a randomized study involving 4563 participants and 31 texts spanning 6 broad subject areas: PubMed (biomedical scientific articles), biology, law, finance, literature/philosophy, and aerospace/computer science. Participants were randomized to viewing original or simplified texts in a subject area, and answered multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that tested their comprehension of the text. The participants were also asked to provide qualitative feedback such as task difficulty. Our results indicate that participants who read the simplified text answered more MCQs correctly than their counterparts who read the original text (3.9% absolute increase, p<0.05). This gain was most striking with PubMed (14.6%), while more moderate gains were observed for finance (5.5%), aerospace/computer science (3.8%) domains, and legal (3.5%). Notably, the results were robust to whether participants could refer back to the text while answering MCQs. The absolute accuracy decreased by up to ~9% for both original and simplified setups where participants could not refer back to the text, but the ~4% overall improvement persisted. Finally, participants' self-reported perceived ease based on a simplified NASA Task Load Index was greater for those who read the simplified text (absolute change on a 5-point scale 0.33, p<0.05). This randomized study, involving an order of magnitude more participants than prior works, demonstrates the potential of LLMs to make complex information easier to understand. Our work aims to enable a broader audience to better learn and make use of expert knowledge available on the web, improving information accessibility.
Text simplification is essential for making complex content accessible to diverse audiences who face comprehension challenges. Yet, the limited availability of simplified materials creates significant barriers to personal and professional growth and hinders social inclusion. Although researchers have explored various methods for automatic text simplification, none fully leverage large language models (LLMs) to offer tailored customization for different target groups and varying levels of simplicity. Moreover, despite its proven benefits for both consumers and organizations, the well-established practice of plain language remains underutilized. In this paper, we https://simplifymytext.org, the first system designed to produce plain language content from multiple input formats, including typed text and file uploads, with flexible customization options for diverse audiences. We employ GPT-4 and Llama-3 and evaluate outputs across multiple metrics. Overall, our work contributes to research on automatic text simplification and highlights the importance of tailored communication in promoting inclusivity.
Despite the successes of language models, their evaluation remains a daunting challenge for new and existing tasks. We consider the task of text simplification, commonly used to improve information accessibility, where evaluation faces two major challenges. First, the data in existing benchmarks might not reflect the capabilities of current language models on the task, often containing disfluent, incoherent, or simplistic examples. Second, existing human ratings associated with the benchmarks often contain a high degree of disagreement, resulting in inconsistent ratings; nevertheless, existing metrics still have to show higher correlations with these imperfect ratings. As a result, evaluation for the task is not reliable and does not reflect expected trends (e.g., more powerful models being assigned higher scores). We address these challenges for the task of text simplification through three contributions. First, we introduce SynthSimpliEval, a synthetic benchmark for text simplification featuring simplified sentences generated by models of varying sizes. Through a pilot study, we show that human ratings on our benchmark exhibit high inter-annotator agreement and reflect the expected trend: larger models produce higher-quality simplifications. Second, we show that auto-evaluation with a panel of LLM judges (LLMs-as-a-jury) often suffices to obtain consistent ratings for the evaluation of text simplification. Third, we demonstrate that existing learnable metrics for text simplification benefit from training on our LLMs-as-a-jury-rated synthetic data, closing the gap with pure LLMs-as-a-jury for evaluation. Overall, through our case study on text simplification, we show that a reliable evaluation requires higher quality test data, which could be obtained through synthetic data and LLMs-as-a-jury ratings.
Can we improve machine translation (MT) with LLMs by rewriting their inputs automatically? Users commonly rely on the intuition that well-written text is easier to translate when using off-the-shelf MT systems. LLMs can rewrite text in many ways but in the context of MT, these capabilities have been primarily exploited to rewrite outputs via post-editing. We present an empirical study of 21 input rewriting methods with 3 open-weight LLMs for translating from English into 6 target languages. We show that text simplification is the most effective MT-agnostic rewrite strategy and that it can be improved further when using quality estimation to assess translatability. Human evaluation further confirms that simplified rewrites and their MT outputs both largely preserve the original meaning of the source and MT. These results suggest LLM-assisted input rewriting as a promising direction for improving translations.
Text simplification is crucial for improving accessibility and comprehension for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. This study goes a step further and aims to facilitate ESL learners' language acquisition by simplification. Specifically, we propose simplifying complex sentences to appropriate levels for learners while also increasing vocabulary coverage of the target level in the simplifications. We achieve this without a parallel corpus by conducting reinforcement learning on a large language model. Our method employs token-level and sentence-level rewards, and iteratively trains the model on its self-generated outputs to guide the model to search for simplification hypotheses that satisfy the target attributes. Experiment results on CEFR-SP and TurkCorpus datasets show that the proposed method can effectively increase the frequency and diversity of vocabulary of the target level by more than $20\%$ compared to baseline models, while maintaining high simplification quality.
Automated text readability prediction is widely used in many real-world scenarios. Over the past century, such measures have primarily been developed and evaluated on reading comprehension outcomes and on human annotations of text readability levels. In this work, we propose an alternative, eye tracking-based cognitive framework which directly taps into a key aspect of readability: reading ease. We use this framework for evaluating a broad range of prominent readability measures, including two systems widely used in education, by quantifying their ability to account for reading facilitation effects in text simplification, as well as text reading ease more broadly. Our analyses suggest that existing readability measures are poor predictors of reading facilitation and reading ease, outperformed by word properties commonly used in psycholinguistics, and in particular by surprisal.
This study introduces an approach to Estonian text simplification using two model architectures: a neural machine translation model and a fine-tuned large language model (LLaMA). Given the limited resources for Estonian, we developed a new dataset, the Estonian Simplification Dataset, combining translated data and GPT-4.0-generated simplifications. We benchmarked OpenNMT, a neural machine translation model that frames text simplification as a translation task, and fine-tuned the LLaMA model on our dataset to tailor it specifically for Estonian simplification. Manual evaluations on the test set show that the LLaMA model consistently outperforms OpenNMT in readability, grammaticality, and meaning preservation. These findings underscore the potential of large language models for low-resource languages and provide a basis for further research in Estonian text simplification.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) holds great promise as a tool to support personalized learning. Teachers need tools to efficiently and effectively enhance content readability of educational texts so that they are matched to individual students reading levels, while retaining key details. Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential to fill this need, but previous research notes multiple shortcomings in current approaches. In this study, we introduced a generalized approach and metrics for the systematic evaluation of the accuracy and consistency in which LLMs, prompting techniques, and a novel multi-agent architecture to simplify sixty informational reading passages, reducing each from the twelfth grade level down to the eighth, sixth, and fourth grade levels. We calculated the degree to which each LLM and prompting technique accurately achieved the targeted grade level for each passage, percentage change in word count, and consistency in maintaining keywords and key phrases (semantic similarity). One-sample t-tests and multiple regression models revealed significant differences in the best performing LLM and prompt technique for each of the four metrics. Both LLMs and prompting techniques demonstrated variable utility in grade level accuracy and consistency of keywords and key phrases when attempting to level content down to the fourth grade reading level. These results demonstrate the promise of the application of LLMs for efficient and precise automated text simplification, the shortcomings of current models and prompting methods in attaining an ideal balance across various evaluation criteria, and a generalizable method to evaluate future systems.
This study proposes DisSim-FinBERT, a novel framework that integrates Discourse Simplification (DisSim) with Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) to enhance sentiment prediction in complex financial texts. By simplifying intricate documents such as Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) minutes, DisSim improves the precision of aspect identification, resulting in sentiment predictions that align more closely with economic events. The model preserves the original informational content and captures the inherent volatility of financial language, offering a more nuanced and accurate interpretation of long-form financial communications. This approach provides a practical tool for policymakers and analysts aiming to extract actionable insights from central bank narratives and other detailed economic documents.
Research on text simplification has primarily focused on lexical and sentence-level changes. Long document-level simplification (DS) is still relatively unexplored. Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have excelled in many natural language processing tasks. However, their performance on DS tasks is unsatisfactory, as they often treat DS as merely document summarization. For the DS task, the generated long sequences not only must maintain consistency with the original document throughout, but complete moderate simplification operations encompassing discourses, sentences, and word-level simplifications. Human editors employ a hierarchical complexity simplification strategy to simplify documents. This study delves into simulating this strategy through the utilization of a multi-stage collaboration using LLMs. We propose a progressive simplification method (ProgDS) by hierarchically decomposing the task, including the discourse-level, topic-level, and lexical-level simplification. Experimental results demonstrate that ProgDS significantly outperforms existing smaller models or direct prompting with LLMs, advancing the state-of-the-art in the document simplification task.
In this paper, we present the SimDoc system, a simplification model considering simplicity, readability, and discourse aspects, such as coherence. In the past decade, the progress of the Text Simplification (TS) field has been mostly shown at a sentence level, rather than considering paragraphs or documents, a setting from which most TS audiences would benefit. We propose a simplification system that is initially fine-tuned with professionally created corpora. Further, we include multiple objectives during training, considering simplicity, readability, and coherence altogether. Our contributions include the extension of professionally annotated simplification corpora by the association of existing annotations into (complex text, simple text, readability label) triples to benefit from readability during training. Also, we present a comparative analysis in which we evaluate our proposed models in a zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning setting using document-level TS corpora, demonstrating novel methods for simplification. Finally, we show a detailed analysis of outputs, highlighting the difficulties of simplification at a document level.
With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), enhancing their performance has become a research hotspot. This paper presents a novel multi-prompt ensemble decoding approach designed to bolster the generation quality of LLMs by leveraging the aggregation of outcomes from multiple prompts. Given a unique input $X$, we submit $n$ variations of prompts with $X$ to LLMs in batch mode to decode and derive probability distributions. For each token prediction, we calculate the ensemble probability by averaging the $n$ probability distributions within the batch, utilizing this aggregated probability to generate the token. This technique is dubbed Inner-Batch Ensemble. To facilitate efficient batch inference, we implement a Left-Padding strategy to maintain uniform input lengths across the n prompts. Through extensive experimentation on diverse NLP tasks, including machine translation, code generation, and text simplification, we demonstrate the efficacy of our method in enhancing LLM performance. The results show substantial improvements in BLEU scores, pass@$k$ rates, and LENS metrics over conventional methods.
Text Simplification is a task that has been minimally explored for low-resource languages. Consequently, there are only a few manually curated datasets. In this paper, we present a human curated sentence-level text simplification dataset for the Sinhala language. Our evaluation dataset contains 1,000 complex sentences and corresponding 3,000 simplified sentences produced by three different human annotators. We model the text simplification task as a zero-shot and zero resource sequence-to-sequence (seq-seq) task on the multilingual language models mT5 and mBART. We exploit auxiliary data from related seq-seq tasks and explore the possibility of using intermediate task transfer learning (ITTL). Our analysis shows that ITTL outperforms the previously proposed zero-resource methods for text simplification. Our findings also highlight the challenges in evaluating text simplification systems, and support the calls for improved metrics for measuring the quality of automated text simplification systems that would suit low-resource languages as well. Our code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/brainsharks-fyp17/Sinhala-Text-Simplification-Dataset-and-Evaluation
Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs do not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset. Models will be public after acceptance.
We investigate the challenge of generating adversarial examples to test the robustness of text classification algorithms detecting low-credibility content, including propaganda, false claims, rumours and hyperpartisan news. We focus on simulation of content moderation by setting realistic limits on the number of queries an attacker is allowed to attempt. Within our solution (TREPAT), initial rephrasings are generated by large language models with prompts inspired by meaning-preserving NLP tasks, e.g. text simplification and style transfer. Subsequently, these modifications are decomposed into small changes, applied through beam search procedure until the victim classifier changes its decision. The evaluation confirms the superiority of our approach in the constrained scenario, especially in case of long input text (news articles), where exhaustive search is not feasible.