Abstract: In this talk, I will present our paper accepted in AAAI 2020. We conduct a data-driven study focusing on analyzing and predicting sentence deletion — a prevalent but understudied phenomenon in document level Text Simplification on a large English text simplification corpus. We inspect various discourse-level factors associated with sentence deletion, using a new manually annotated sentence alignment corpus we collected. We reveal that professional editors utilize different strategies to meet the readability standards of elementary and middle schools. To predict whether a sentence will be deleted during simplification to a certain level, we harness automatically aligned data to train a classification model. We find that discourse-level factors contribute to the challenging task of predicting sentence deletion for simplification.
Bio: Yang Zhong is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, advised by Prof. Wei Xu. His research mainly focuses on the stylistic variation of language, as well as in the field of document level text simplification.