Unsupervised Statistical Text Simplification

Most recent approaches for Text Simplification (TS) have drawn on insights from machine translation to learn simplification rewrites from the monolingual parallel corpus of complex and simple sentences, yet their effectiveness strongly relies on large amounts of parallel sentences. However, there has been a serious problem haunting TS for decades, that is, the availability of parallel TS corpora is scarce or not fit for the learning task. In this paper, we will focus on one especially useful and challenging problem of unsupervised TS without a single parallel sentence. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first unsupervised text simplification system based on phrase-based machine translation system, which leverages a careful initialization of phrase tables and language models. On the widely used WikiLarge and WikiSmall benchmarks, our system respectively obtains 39.08 and 25.12 SARI points, even outperforms some supervised baselines.