Papers › Explain to me like I am five -- Sentence Simplification Using Transformers

Explain to me like I am five -- Sentence Simplification Using Transformers

8 Dec 2022arXiv:2212.04595archive 2025-07-28

Aman Agarwal

Sentence simplification aims at making the structure of text easier to read and understand while maintaining its original meaning. This can be helpful for people with disabilities, new language learners, or those with low literacy. Simplification often involves removing difficult words and rephrasing the sentence. Previous research have focused on tackling this task by either using external linguistic databases for simplification or by using control tokens for desired fine-tuning of sentences. However, in this paper we purely use pre-trained transformer models. We experiment with a combination of GPT-2 and BERT models, achieving the best SARI score of 46.80 on the Mechanical Turk dataset, which is significantly better than previous state-of-the-art results. The code can be found at https://github.com/amanbasu/sentence-simplification.

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPT-2Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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