Zero-shot crosslingual sentence simplification

Abstract

Sentence simplification aims to make sentences easier to read and understand. Recent approaches have shown promising results with encoder-decoder models trained on large amounts of parallel data which often only exists in English. We propose a zero-shot modeling framework which transfers simplification knowledge from English to another language (for which no parallel simplification corpus exists) while generalizing across languages and tasks. A shared transformer encoder constructs language-agnostic representations, with a combination of task-specific encoder layers added on top (e.g., for translation and simplification). Empirical results using both human and automatic metrics show that our approach produces better simplifications than unsupervised and pivot-based methods.