Text simplification as a controlled text style transfer task

Abstract

The task of text simplification is to reduce the complexity of the given piece of text while preserving its original meaning to improve readability and understanding. In this paper, we consider the simplification task as a subfield of the general text style transfer problem and apply methods of controllable text style to rewrite texts in a simpler manner preserving their meaning. Namely, we use a paraphrase model guided by another style-conditional language model. In our work, we perform a series of experiments and compare this approach with the standard fine-tuning of an autoregressive model.